Aside from the fact they are Washington teammates who this afternoon will participate in the Huskies’ first official practice of the college basketball season, Tony Wroten and Aziz N’Diaye share little in common.
Wroten is a freshman, a few weeks into his first semester of college.
N’Diaye, a junior, spent a year at a prep school outside Chicago, and another two years at the College of Southern Idaho, before transferring to UW.
Wroten graduated from Garfield High, 3.3 miles south of Hec Edmundson Pavilion.
N’Diaye grew up in the Senegal city of Dakar, 6,140 miles from Seattle.
Wroten, at 6-foot-5, owns a jaw-dropping array of offensive skills – coach Lorenzo Romar sees a bit of Magic Johnson in the swingman’s passing ability – but he’ll need time to adjust to Romar’s philosophy that a basketball team’s offense begins with defense.
N’Diaye, one of only three 7-footers to have played for the Huskies under Romar, can be a defensive force who rebounds and blocks shots, but he has yet to realize his potential as a back-to-the-basket pillar of a half-court set.
Wroten’s father, a standout tight end at Washington, continued his football career with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. His mother ran track for UW and Arizona State. His aunt, Joyce Walker, was a two-time All-American at LSU who went on to play with the Harlem Globetrotters.
Nate Robinson, one of the best all-around athletes in UW history, is a cousin.
N’Diaye, who concentrated on soccer as a kid, didn’t take up basketball until he was 14. He’s spent the past two summers around Seattle in an attempt to become a more nuanced player capable of converting the occasional baseline hook shot, or putback around the rim.
Seven time zones removed from his relatives, N’Diaye has come to regard offseason basketball tutor Spencer Hawes as a big brother.
Does he miss his family in Senegal? Of course.
“But I’m here for a reason,” N’Diaye said earlier this week. “I’m here to get an education, and to improve as a basketball player.”
A Seattle playground legend before his teens, Wroten averaged 20.8 points and 3.8 assists as a high school freshman.
Since arriving in the U.S. in 2007, N’Diaye has never finished a season with a double-figure scoring average.
Wroten is the most ballyhooed member of a class that has restocked Romar’s roster with seven new names.
N’Diaye is among the six returning Huskies with starting experience.
Washington’s bid for a fourth straight NCAA tournament appearance hinges on a successful assimilation of freshmen such as Wroten and veterans such as N’Diaye.
“It’s an interesting blend,” Romar said the other day. “Half our team has played in championship games, road games and NCAA tournament games, and half our team hasn’t played at all, because they’re freshmen.
“It’s a unique mix for us – we’ve got more freshmen than any year that we’ve been here,” continued Romar, who is beginning his 10th season of coaching the Huskies. “We’ll be very busy trying to get everyone on the same page. Once everyone is comfortable, the next step will be to find out who blends in, who mixes and meshes to help us put the best team on the floor.”
The Huskies’ best team figures to mix Wroten’s flash and dash with N’Diaye’s intimidating presence in the lane. Wroten was born to run a fastbreak; N’Diaye, whose playing time last season was restricted by knee and toe ailments, is still learning the game in increments.
He may be 6,140 miles from home, but N’Diaye has developed beyond the point where everything on the basketball floor was foreign to him.
“Not knowing where you’re supposed to go can handcuff you sometimes, and take away your athleticism,” Romar said. “With a year here under his belt, Aziz is getting to places more quickly.”
The toe and knee injuries behind him, N’Diaye is moving more fluidly than he did last season. A dedicated student – he’s fluent in English, Spanish and French, his native language – N’Diaye’s challenge is to assert physical skills uncommon for a 7-footer.
During an informal workout the other day, Romar asked the big fella to pick a player he wanted to defend for an open-court defensive drill.
N’Diaye chose shooting guard C.J. Wilcox.
“C.J.,” Romar noted with a laugh, “may be the fastest guy on the team. That shows the kind of confidence Aziz has right now.”
Confidence isn’t an issue for Wroten. To the contrary, his video-clip antics last March – during Garfield’s victory in the Class 4A state semifinal game at the Tacoma Dome, he intentionally caromed an undisputed layup off the glass, so he could finish with a thunder jam – found some observers less impressed with the dunk’s degree of difficulty than with Wroten’s degree of arrogance.
“If you go off how I play the game, I’m very emotional. I’m always pumped,” Wroten said Tuesday. “So I could get people thinking I’m a bad person. But those same people who call me a bad person, once they meet me, they’re, ‘Man, Tony Wroten, he’s a whole different person.’ ”
With a basketball in hands, Wroten is a whole different teammate, too.
“Tony’s a very good passer, but we’re work in process,” N’Diaye said. “Sometimes it’s hard to read his mind.”
The difficult project of meshing those minds begins today.
Establishing a sort of telepathic cohesiveness between the brash kid from Seattle and the cerebral student from Senegal won’t happen overnight. It’ll take weeks, maybe months, of practice, practice and more practice.
But it will happen, and we’ll know it happens when N’Diaye pulls down a rebound and fires off an outlet pass to Wroten, who races down the court before setting up the 7-foot center with a no-look, sweet-as-can-be feed.
As the sequence sends the Hec Edmundson Pavilion crowd into frenzy, Lorenzo Romar will smile, knowing that he’s duped the public with the sham of all shams.
It’ll look effortless.
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