ESPN NBA

In PLAY, The New York Times' occasional sports magazine, Tommy Craggs (he's the same writer who talked religion with Stephon Marbury) uses high-school big man Renardo Sidney as a lens through which to view American basketball development. Well worth the read. Many TrueHoop regulars -- from lawyer Michael McCann to trainer Brian McCormick -- are cited.

Here's a favorite passage:

He made his name in the demimonde of summer basketball: what the sneakers companies call grass-roots basketball and what most everyone else calls, in slightly misleading shorthand, A.A.U. basketball. (Many, but not all, of the events fall under the purview of the Amateur Athletic Union, a nonprofit that promotes and oversees amateur sports.) What they're talking about is the ecosystem of shoe-company-sponsored summer traveling teams, shoe-company-sponsored summer tournaments and shoe-company-sponsored summer camps.

It is a vast, roiling Dodge City of the hoops landscape, lying as it does outside the reach of high-school coaches and the regulatory arm of the N.C.A.A. - an unsavory world, in the popular imagination, of street agents and shoe boxes full of cash and chest-thumping 16-year-olds with Adidas stripes branded like bar codes on their foreheads. And largely for that reason, summer ball has become a catch-all symbol of basketball indulgence, blamed for everything from the death of the bounce pass to the corruption of America's youth to the occasional failures of the grown men who represent USA Basketball on the international stage. It is something like basketball's bad conscience.

And it was in this system that Sidney thrived. "He blew up in A.A.U. basketball," says Renardo Sr., who, until his contract expired recently, earned about $20,000 a year as a Reebok "consultant," a job that mostly entailed shepherding his son to Reebok-sponsored events. In 2007, Renardo Sr. started his own grass-roots outfit, the L.A. Dream Team, sponsored by Reebok and coached by Renardo Sr. himself. (He also mentors kids and works as a sort of personal trainer for other aspiring basketball players.)

By August, however, the start of Sidney's senior year, things had gone awry. Having relocated to Los Angeles in 2006, he was now attracting interest from a variety of college teams - among them Memphis, U.C.L.A., Texas and Arizona State, according to recruiting scuttlebutt - and perhaps even entertaining the notion, as some loose gossip had it, of playing in Europe next year. But he had put on weight. He talked wistfully about going fishing and "getting away from basketball," which made him sound more like a 38-year-old power forward on a second tour with the Clippers. Sidney fell in everyone's esteem. Rivals.com, a prominent recruiting site that offers a national ranking of prospects, nearly bounced him out of its top 10. A handful of scouts even figured him for a bust.

He is a "prima donna and has one of the worst attitudes that we've ever seen," wrote Clark Francis, the editor of Hoop Scoop Online and a bigfoot on the recruiting scene, in a scathing evaluation of Sidney. By Francis's lights, the kid with the thumb in his mouth had become the bogeyman of modern basketball. "As a matter of fact," he wrote, "Sidney could be the poster boy for many of [the] things that are wrong with grass-roots basketball and is the perfect example of just how bad the sense of entitlement among many of the top players has become."