Twelve years ago, Rumeal Robinson was the best high school player in the state of Massachusetts. Now he's trying to find room in a star-glutted NBA.

Part 2

by Tom Scocca

There's little question what the high point of Robinson's basketball career will have been, when all is said and done. In 1989, with the clock running down in the national championship game and Michigan trailing Seton Hall by one point, he drove to the basket, got fouled, and, with millions watching, sank both ensuing free throws for an 80-79 win and the title.

That was his junior year. He followed it by averaging a robust 19 points, six assists, and four rebounds a game as a senior, and was drafted in the first round, with the 10th pick overall, by the Atlanta Hawks. He signed for $2.2 million over four years; by his second season, he'd taken the starting point guard position from Spud Webb, and he went on to lead the team in assists.

But in the 1992 off-season, the Hawks swapped him to the New Jersey Nets for another young point guard, Mookie Blaylock, and veteran forward Roy Hinson. His playing time declined there, and he was shipped off to the Charlotte Hornets the next year. His scoring average dwindled from thirteen points a game to four; by 1994, he was playing for the Rapid City Thrillers and the Shreveport Crawdads of the minor-league CBA. After a season and a half, he made it back to the big league, where, as his official career notes record, the wandering continued: signed by Portland Trail Blazers to first of two consecutive 10-day contracts . . . signed as free agent by Los Angeles Lakers . . . traded by Lakers with [forward] Cedric Ceballos to Phoenix Suns for [forward] Robert Horry and [center] Joe Kleine . . . waived by Suns . . . signed by Trail Blazers. . . .

The path is a well-trod one. The hard fact of the National Basketball Association is that not everybody gets to be a superstar; indeed, not everybody gets to keep a job. Nearly everyone in the league (save for a few raw seven-footers) comes in with a sense of mastery of the game, having been a legend in high school and a star in college; most of them leave as nonentities. Top draft picks are not immune: of the 26 players selected along with Robinson in the first round in 1990, 11 are already out of the NBA, including such college stars as Bo Kimble, Tate George, and Alaa Abdelnaby, who passed through the Celtics on his way to oblivion.

The difference between success and failure is not strictly a matter of skill. It's a commonplace that the worst benchwarmer in the league can, if left to his own devices, shoot the eyes out of the basket, dribble like a Harlem Globetrotter, dunk with appalling force and ingenuity. What counts for the average player is the ability to adapt those skills to a world where everyone else can play ball that well, too. The longer a player takes to find his niche, the more likely it is that he'll lose the opportunity to look for it.

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Tom Scocca can be reached at tscocca[a]phx.com.