SAN ANTONIO, Feb. 10 -- While all around him, 21- and 22-year- olds were flushed with excitement of taking part in the NBA's All-Star Weekend, Arvydas Sabonis, the oldest man in the NBA Rookie Game Saturday night, took it all with a bemused air. 'Making the rookie team makes me feel young again,' Sabonis said. 'Not many guys make the rookie team at 31.' The Portland Trail Blazers didn't want Sabonis to be a 31-year-old rookie with sore feet and knees. They drafted him with the 24th pick overall in the 1986 NBA draft and wooed him for eight years. Sabonis, though, elected to let the NBA wait, playing professionally in Europe and leading the Soviet Union to an Olympic gold medal and his native Lithuania to a silver at the 1994 World Championships, giving the nation a berth in the 1996 Olympics. In the rookie game Saturday night, Sabonis started but played just four minutes, scoring eight points, grabbing three rebounds, and doing what perhaps has made him most well-known in the United States -- he hit a three-pointer. Though at 7-3 and 292 pounds Sabonis is one of the biggest men in a league of giants, he has a sweet touch from beyond the arc -- one of the key reasons the Trail Blazers were willing to risk a first round pick on a player who never told them he would come to America. When he finally did decide to try the NBA, following in the footsteps of such European stars as Toni Kukoc, Drazen Petrovic, Vlade Divac and Dino Radja, he was clearly past his prime.
'I'm happy I still came,' Sabonis said through the translation of Alexander Volkov, a Russian who played in the NBA and now works for the league. 'I've become a well-known player, even with all the injuries. I might have regrets, but I live in the present.' In the present, Sabonis plays on an underachieving team that has been wracked by internal conflicts, most notably the long-standing feud between coach P.J. Carlesimo and point guard Rod Strickland and the disgruntled forward Clifford Robinson. 'I don't understand a lot of English, so those things go by me,' he said, explaining that he doesn't get involved in such controversies. More than anything else he found in the NBA, that kind of turmoil on a team surprised Sabonis, but he hasn't let it keep him from a solid season, averaging 13.3 points and 7.2 rebounds in 23 minutes a game. Sabonis has no illusions about what he missed by not banging bodies with Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing and Shaquille O'Neal the last nine years. 'It's the best basketball in the world, every night there's a challenge,' Sabonis said. 'Everybody is faster, everybody is better. It is simply the best.'