The N.B.A. draft at Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, is a scene of family
happiness that feels both intensely cathartic and also overdetermined.
The players sit at round tables before an enormous stage; behind them
are rows of press tables and, behind that, two separate TV sets with
live commentary. The proceedings are witnessed by half an arena of fans,
most of them wearing jerseys of the Knicks, Boston, Philly, Lakers, OKC,
and so on, including two different Shawn Kemp Seattle SuperSonics
jerseys. The atmosphere in the stands is a peculiar mixture of slavish
devotion and a yearning to lament. Chants of “Fire Phil!” ripple through
the arena now and then, driven by a bearded young man in a Knicks jersey
who stomps around with a piece of cardboard on which these two words
are written.

The N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, appears at the podium. Names are
called. Thin young men rise to hug their weeping mothers, kiss their
smiling sisters, slap hands with fathers, brothers, and friends. Each is
handed a cap with the name of the team that drafted him on it as he makes
his way up to the stage. It’s like a graduation, though it’s not
entirely clear what they are graduating from. Not high school; there is
an N.B.A. age minimum of nineteen for players, even though the
one-and-done era is getting awkward and is probably nearing its end. The
first seven picks of this year’s draft were all freshmen, a record. And
the draft is not a college graduation; there were only two seniors
drafted in the first two rounds.

Up on the podium, there is a handshake with the commissioner—or a soul
shake, depending on last-second hand communications. Then a smile for
the cameras. A huge video monitor is filled with highlights of the young
man onstage, doing his thing. Then the draftee steps off one stage and
onto a television set for a live interview with N.B.A. “Fantasy
Insiders” Dennis Scott and Rick Kamla. This produces some nice moments,
such as when Josh Jackson, a large, athletic player whose highlight reel
of cacophonous dunks is playing on the screen, is asked, “Where do you
get that competitive spirit?” “My mom,” he says. He adds that he would
play her one on one, and she would regularly win and make him cry.

From there, the players move onto a haunted house of media obligations
that wend their way through the concrete hallways of the Barclays Center
like stations of the cross—the social-media room, the interview room,
the Tissot-watch presentation room, and, finally, the live room. The
players must stop and talk at each stall. In the hallways, they are
harassed or approached or ignored by the free-floating mob of
journalists and functionaries, and also random kids who are, I presume,
related to someone who knows someone somewhere who is important somehow.

The Frenchman Frank Ntilikina, a resident of Strasbourg, in Alsace, on
the border of Germany, is draft pick No. 8 by the Knicks. I go down to
the interview room to see him up close. He wears a dark-red suit and a
red bow tie with a crisp white shirt. All basketball players look more
slender in person than on TV, doubly true of these young guys in the
draft, but Ntilikina is nearly avian. The child of Rwandan parents, he
is a six-feet-five point guard who was born in Belgium and moved to
France at an early age. He is asked for his thoughts on Phil Jackson and
replies, “The triangle is a system that brings him a lot of
championships. I think I can definitely fit with this system.” He is
asked about his suit. He has been working with a tailor on his suit for
about three months, he says.

I ask him a question that begins, “I’m wondering about your childhood in
France.” I point out that New York is famous for producing point guards
who hone their skill in competitive pickup basketball games. “I’m
wondering if any such thing exists in Strasbourg, and if you could say
anything about when you fell in love with the sport when you were a
kid.”

“I fell in love with the sport when I played with my brother in the
park. I was every day going to the park trying to play.”

“Which park?”

“Close to my house. It’s called La Citadelle.”

Then he is out in the concrete hallway, surrounded by a gaggle of press
like a statesman emerging from a high-level meeting. They are all
French—correspondents from Le Figaro, Le Monde, and others. The
journalists are full of gossip. Ntilikina is leaving in a few hours, for
a 2 A.M. flight back to Paris, because the professional team for which
he plays, SIG Strasbourg, is in the last game of the league finals the
following night. It’s a charter flight that, one of them claims to know,
cost ninety thousand dollars. A camerawoman named Gaelle mentions that
Ntilikina’s childhood coach, Abdel, was among the party at his table,
and was happier than she had ever seen him. I am intrigued that
Ntilikina, the youngest player in the draft, had flown his childhood
coach over from France to join his family on this occasion.

I ask Gaelle how she knew Abdel. She explains that he had been her
coach when she attended basketball camp at age eleven. Meeting him is
suddenly my top priority. Gaelle, amazingly, has his number. There is a
series of texts and confused, murky phone calls. I go to an arranged
spot and realize that I am scanning the crowd for a person whose only
defining characteristic is that he is, as Gaelle put it, “glowing with
joy.” Twenty minutes later, I am standing before Abdel Loucif in the
food court, next to Cafe Habana. He is still glowing with joy. He wears
a gray suit and a shirt with no tie. His frizzy hair is combed back, his
forehead broad and gleaming. He doesn’t speak all that much English, and
I speak almost no French. But it is wonderful to talk to him because his
basketball lexicon is infused with unusual ingredients that I cannot
readily identify but that make me happy, too.

Abdel first coached Frank when he was thirteen, he says. “He worked a
lot. When he missed a lot of shots, he got to the playground after
practice and worked alone.”

“Which playground?” I ask.

“The Citadelle! At the Citadelle, he played very free, but in practice he
was very rigorous. My philosophy when working with young players is to
give them a sense of pleasure in working. Frank’s values, I saw it in
his eyes from the first day. We begin the first practices and you tell
him, ‘Go to this line,’ and he goes. And when he plays in a game he
immediately uses what you taught him. But he uses it in a way that makes
it his own.”

“Not a lot of young players have this ability to combine what you tell
them with the ability to improvise. Not a lot of young players can do
that.”

It turns out that Abdel came to basketball from an unusual angle. He
grew up in Schirmeck, a small town near Strasbourg, and studied
mathematics and physics at the university at Strasbourg. From the ages
of twenty-three to thirty-two, he was a math teacher. Only then did he
begin teaching and coaching young kids in basketball. A bunch of young
kids in Knicks jerseys walk by. I ask one of them to take our picture,
and while he sizes up the frame—“Portrait or landscape?” he asks,
earnestly—I can’t help but blurt out, “This guy right here coached Frank
Ntilikina when he was a kid!” They besiege Abdel with questions about
how Frank is going to help the Knicks, which Frank interprets to be
questions about how Frank will improve himself. He starts mimicking
weight lifting until I explain that their interest is not in Frank but
in the Knicks. The kids are suddenly seized with a sense of duty to
explain the basketball horror in which they have spent their whole
lives—I don’t think they were even born during the Sprewell glory days,
never mind Ewing. They take turns saying how awful and hopeless the
Knicks are, and how Phil should be fired. Sometimes I think being a
Knicks fan is just the process of fermenting bitterness until it turns
to joy.

Abdel continues to exude a magnificent mixture of gravity and elation.
“The N.B.A. was for him a great dream,” Abdel says, when I ask him more
about Frank at thirteen. “When his name was called tonight, I was so
happy. I remember when he began to play, and we speak a lot of times of
N.B.A. and some players, like Durant, one of his favorite players. And
now he is here.” Afterward, as we prepare to part, it occurs to me to
ask what kind of math Abdel specialized in as a teacher. In what might
be the most auspicious Knicks news of the night, he responded,
“Geometry.” “You’re kidding! That is so great!” I shout. “The triangle!”
And Abdel throws his head back and laughs, and the Cafe Habana is
lowering its gates, the hour is getting late, and we shout and laugh
some more, and pat each other’s shoulders. I am at last enveloped in the
irrational joy of sports fandom, when you think other people’s triumphs
are your own.