A System With Teeth

Structured teams lose while teaching you what they might become. Rival scouts began arriving earlier. One of them, an old Western Conference evaluator, watched practice from the bleachers and spoke to Daniel without looking at him. "You know this is when people start trying to steal your players." "They were free three months ago," Daniel said. "Free things get expensive once they work." The first real test came in Madison Square Garden. New York had size, money, and a crowd that treated visiting weakness as theater. During warmups, a fan shouted at Marcus that he looked like someone who won a radio contest. Marcus laughed, then missed his first five shots. The laughter stopped by the fourth quarter.