Jennings off to Answer-like start, no question about it

Brandon Jennings remembers the first time he saw his idol play. Allen Iverson had Michael Jordan lined up at the top of the key, darting right and left like a cobra before coldly dismantling him with the weapon that would sustain him for 13 years in the NBA -- that devastating crossover dribble.

To some, it was just a confident kid doing his thing. To others, it was a sign that the NBA was doomed. How could Iverson, with his street ways and showboat game, disrespect Jordan that way? What kind of knuckleheads were taking over the NBA?

Brandon Jennings averaged 24.2 points, 5.7 assists and 4.3 rebounds in his first 12 games. (US Presswire)

Somehow, that was almost 13 years ago, and a skinny little kid with big dreams and a soft spot for the underdog has made it to the NBA. I mean really made it. Brandon Jennings was 7 years old when he saw Iverson cross up His Airness at the foul line, and now he's wearing his idol's No. 3 as a rookie with the Milwaukee Bucks. His entrance onto the NBA stage has been no less dramatic. His impact, by all early indications, will be no less important.

"Growing up, I wasn't the big Michael Jordan fan like everybody else was," Jennings said on the phone from New Orleans, where the surprising Bucks (8-4) were to play the Hornets on Wednesday night. "I was a big Allen Iverson fan. The things that he did out on the court, I thought were amazing at the time. Growing up, he was my big idol."

Of course he was. Right from the start, right from the very first moment when basketball grabbed him and wouldn't let go, Jennings decided he would never follow the crowd.

Now the crowd follows him. The Bradley Center, until this season a public morgue in the basketball hinterlands, is buzzing. The place is alive, pulsing with anticipation every time Jennings touches the ball. When he goes on the road, to Memphis and San Antonio and now New Orleans, they buy tickets to see him. Averaging 24.2 points, 5.7 assists, and shooting .475 from 3-point range on a team that is boldly thinking about the playoffs, Jennings is the early favorite for NBA Rookie of the Year.

"People are getting to the arena early," Bucks assistant Kelvin Sampson said, "because you don't know what this kid's gonna do."

Jennings has surprised even himself. The cocky kid with the chip on his shoulder, who boldly proclaimed that pre-draft competitor Ricky Rubio was "all hype," has softened the bravado. You don't need to talk when you score 55 points as a 20-year-old rookie, eclipsing Milwaukee's first-year mark of 51 set by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1970. You don't need gimmicks when you become the youngest player in NBA history to have a 50-point game, or score the most points in a game as a rookie since Earl "The Pearl" Monroe had 56 in 1968.

"I didn't expect to come in here and do what I'm doing right now," Jennings said.

In fairness, the Bucks didn't see it coming, either. Not like this.

General manager John Hammond and his front-office staff -- Billy McKinney and Jeff Weltman -- made the trip to Europe like every other NBA hierarchy last season to watch Jennings ride the bench for his Italian team, Lottomatica Roma. With Jennings playing barely 20 minutes a night, they had to delve deeper. The film sessions back in Milwaukee were long, yet revealing. Sampson, the former coach at Indiana University, had seen Jennings as a McDonald's All-American out of Oak Hill Academy. By the time Jennings joined several other top point guards to work out for the Bucks, Hammond and coach Scott Skiles knew exactly what they were going to do with the 10th pick if Jennings was still available.

Jennings stood out in the workout, which also included Jonny Flynn, Ty Lawson and Jeff Teague. When the Timberwolves picked Rubio and Flynn back-to-back, the road-weary men in the Bucks' draft room exhaled. When the Warriors picked Stephen Curry (No. 7), the Knicks chose Jordan Hill (No. 8), and the Raptors opted for DeMar DeRozan (No. 9), it was all the walls of that draft room could do to remain standing.

"It was a no-brainer for us," Sampson said. "We couldn't get our pick in quick enough."

It didn't come without controversy. How could the Bucks, barely relevant and unable to so much as pretend to have the funds to keep free agents Charlie Villanueva and Ramon Sessions, follow up the Joe Alexander debacle in 2008 with such an outright gamble? How could they pair a cocky kid who's 170 pounds soaking wet -- a kid who bypassed college for a paycheck in the EuroLeague -- with a no-nonsense coach like Skiles?

According to Sampson, Skiles and Jennings have one very important trait in common: Neither is who he appears to be. Skiles, a former point guard who still holds the NBA single-game assist record with 30, doesn't wear his perpetual sideline scowl all the time. ("That's a bad rap," Sampson said. "He's a player's coach.") And the player Skiles now has the joy of coaching is the same sort of chameleon.

Sampson's first clue came during Las Vegas summer league, when the Bucks beat the Kings in an otherwise meaningless game in mid-July. Jennings didn't give an inch to No. 4 overall pick Tyreke Evans, and the point guards dueled late into the night. Evans had 33 points, getting to the free-throw line at will. But I remember sitting in the gym and marveling at Jennings, who had 13 points, 14 assists and seven steals. The performance was noteworthy enough, I thought, to seek out Skiles in the locker room afterward and get his thoughts.

"Um, I'd rather not," Skiles said. "It's only summer league."

I pressed, suggesting that Skiles surely had developed some kind of impression of his prized draft pick.

"Oh, I have an impression," Skiles said. And he wouldn't say anything else. Soon, he wouldn't need to.

What I learned later is this: The most important thing to Jennings that night was winning the game. Sampson began to understand this, too, when the team returned to Milwaukee for offseason workouts. Jennings, driving to and from the practice gym in a thrifty Ford Edge instead of a luxury SUV, wound up renting a place in the same modest condo development that Sampson was calling home. The players lifted, played five-on-five, did conditioning drills and called it a day. Not Jennings. One night, Sampson received a text message: "Coach, can we get back in the gym and work out?"

Jennings brought a cousin who was staying with him; he needed someone to rebound the hundreds of shots he was hoisting until after 11 p.m. The next night, there was another text, and another shooting marathon. After that, no more texts were needed.

"It became a nightly ritual for us," Sampson said.

All those shots -- beautifully awkward left-handed shots -- paid off in ways that neither Jennings nor Sampson imagined. With leading scorer Michael Redd sidelined until Monday night's loss in San Antonio, Jennings needed to quell his pass-first instincts and score more. The double-nickel against Golden State gets all the YouTube views, but Jennings also had 29 against Charlotte, 25 against Dallas (and another idol, Jason Kidd), 32 against Denver ("I grew up watching Chauncey Billups," he said), and a near triple-double on opening night in Philadelphia, where Iverson had famously pulled the rug out from under the master so many years ago.

"I just expected to come in here and run the team and just try to get wins," Jennings said. "I didn't expect to do everything that I'm doing right now. It's a big surprise to me."

His welcome-to-the-NBA moment came Monday night against the Spurs, whose advanced defensive schemes held Jennings to 12 points on 6-for-21 shooting. There will be more nights like that, Sampson told him.

"That was really the first game he's had where he looked human," Sampson said. "A game like is something that he needed to understand this game is not easy."

It sure looked easy against Golden State. But when Sampson and the other coaches made their nightly pass through the locker room to shake hands with the players after the game -- which they do, win or lose -- Sampson didn't find a giddy 20-year-old acting like he'd arrived.

"I said, 'Nice game, young fella,'" Sampson recalled. "And he said, 'Coach, thank God we won that game. I wouldn't want to score 55 and lose.'"

The journey is only beginning; there will be more nights like that one, too. The only regret I heard from Jennings on the phone Tuesday was that a certain someone, an icon who wore No. 3 and helped take the NBA from Jordan, wasn't around to pass it on to him.

The Bucks played the Grizzlies last week, and Iverson was already gone, in some self-imposed exile, perhaps never to be heard from again. Iverson's team was 22-60 during his rookie season of 1996-97. Among those 60 losses was the game in which Iverson arrived with his signature move against Jordan. It lives in online eternity, along with the result that night: Bulls 108, Sixers 104.

"I was looking forward to going up against him," Jennings said. "Hopefully he does get another shot. That would be something I'd never forget, and I could one day tell my kids that I got to play against a guy that was my idol."

And if somehow Jennings finds himself sizing up Iverson at the foul line? The laugh on the other end of the phone was long, and loud, and real.

"If it happened," he said, "I would probably try to go at him just a little bit."