In the afternoon, Zhang Hao and Carter continued to train, Mike Bibby went to play, he has a game this afternoon, tomorrow is the McDonald's High School All-Star Game, today's game is over, and the more than 2,000 fans on the scene will vote for 18 All-Star high school students.

But this Zhang Hao doesn't care, Carter doesn't care, the two compete for a shooting duel, each time it's 50 balls, Zhang Hao shoots a long shot, Carter shoots three points, and occasionally Carter will also shoot a shot, and Carter's foundation is also good, but compared with Zhang Hao, who specializes in mid-range shooting and has made rapid progress recently, it is indeed far behind.

This made Carter even more intrigued, and he decided to work it.

On the second day, the McDonald's High School All-Star Game arrived, Zhang Hao and Carter were not ready to watch, the strength of the players on the court may not lose to them, at this stage of high school, physical fitness is the first, so Mike Bibby's talented people with outstanding skills are particularly concerned by those colleges, because they are special, and those with good physical fitness are really a big handful.

But the game itself ...... It's really not much to see.

Just when the two of them were concentrating on personal training and occasionally trying to fight each other, in an office on the second floor of the Great Western Forum Arena, someone would watch the training of the two for a while from time to time in the window.

"Jerry, you're watching that high school student again?" A middle-aged man in his 40s came into the office and said to Jerry West, the team's general manager in his 50s, "That's a good guy named Carter, right, we can wait for him to come out of college and try to draft him." ”

On the public side, Carter, who is only a high school student, is not known to so many people, but for the management of NBA teams with many scouts, Carter's talent has long been recognized, after all, he is the best high school student in Florida, and he has received a full scholarship promise from the basketball school North Carolina, and after two or three years of college workout, under normal circumstances, a pretty good professional player will definitely appear.

Jerry West smiled and replied, "yes, Mitch, Carter is very good, and may be part of our future revival plans." ”

They Lakers have a lot of high-quality chips, but lottery draft picks in the next few years will not be easy to get, and they will have to really bleed their money to do it, and maybe they will have to use a center to get it.

A talent like Carter must have a lot of teams to compete for, and from what Jerry West knows so far, he judges that the draft in the next few years will be very hot, and some teams will be very bad, and talented college students like Duncan, Iverson, and Olovocandi are too attractive.

Their Lakers record will certainly not be much worse, with Divac as an All-Star center, and in the past three years, they have used the low-to-medium pick to find so many outstanding players, and the playoffs are still proper, and it is basically impossible to get lottery draft picks in the next two or three years.

Of course, the attention should be paid to, Jerry West already has a revival plan and has begun to lay out the media side, but there is still an outside line to go.

Carter, who is one of Jerry West's targets, reminds Jerry West of Dominic Wilkins in his youth.

He started out because Carter came to train and paid attention to it, and he didn't go to Seattle with the team, and they certainly didn't have a chance to win the championship this year, although Eddie Jones and Van Exel have the strength of the All-Star edge, and Divac is also an All-Star level, but they want to win the championship with these three people...... It's hard to even have three of them in their prime together, so Jerry West has been focusing on the future since the mid-season trade deadline didn't get anything.

By the way, Jerry West paid attention to a Chinese high school student and the talented white point guard in New Jersey, originally just because the Chinese high school student showed amazing running and jumping ability in the slam dunk contest trials two days ago, and McDonald's has increased its publicity in the Chinese community in the past two days, Jerry West has an impression.

But he found that this Chinese high school student not only has excellent athletic ability, but also excellent shooting ability!

Jerry West has observed Chinese players, and these players are theoretically very good at shooting, but their shortcomings are more prominent, maintaining mobility and not enough confrontation.

Zhang Hao is the same, if you want to talk about the shortcomings, that is, it is too "thin", it doesn't matter in high school, but in the NCAA kind of adult competition, it may be exposed.

There is often a high ceiling for Chinese players, mainly Chinese basketball, basically limited to China, Chinese basketball is a product of the system, rarely let players go to Europe, the United States leagues to play, and Chinese basketball development is deformed, almost every player, since childhood, is to play center, the basic skills of the inside players are relatively good, but the basic skills of the outside players are generally after the body shape is fixed before they really concentrate on practicing outside skills, but it was too late at that time.

He saw Zhang Hao's training in the past two days and found a very amazing thing.

In terms of technology, Zhang Hao can't compare with Mike Bibi, and he is far behind Carterby.

But in the area of middle-distance shooting, Zhang Hao, who is still in high school, already has an NBA-level level! It may not be particularly good in the NBA, but it is definitely qualified, even excellent!

Mike Bibby and Carter don't have much of a concept, so they think Zhang Hao's mid-range shooting is very powerful, but Jerry West, who has worked in the NBA for more than 30 years in the player + manager era, sees more.

This is not the end, Jerry West is very keenly aware of the difference between Zhang Hao's training on the second day and the details of the first day's training, that is to say, Zhang Hao can complete an effective summary after one day of training!

Having a sense of summarizing every training session and being able to summarize things are two different things.

Zhang Hao's talent in the middle distance shocked Jerry West! Mid-range shooting is the most difficult of all shooting techniques, Mike Bibby only specializes in the distance from the free throw line to the three-point line for two long points, Carter although this piece of shooting makes Jerry West feel his all-round shooting talent, but in terms of mid-range, talent is not as amazing as Zhang Hao.

Zhang Hao reminded Jerry West of a player — former 76ers Andrew Toney, the mid-range champion who defeated their championship team in the Finals more than a decade ago.

Jerry West deliberately looked for scouts to collect information about Zhang Hao, and since Zhang Hao is a high school student in Los Angeles, the information is not so difficult to collect.

And the results collected made Jerry West wonder a little, why is such a high school student not interested in college?

Jerry West even believes that Zhang Hao went to the United States to study, and then became interested in basketball before starting to practice, because he can see very special things in just these two days......

However, Jerry West thought about it carefully, even he, the general manager of the local NBA team in Los Angeles, didn't know Zhang Hao, let alone those colleges? Even he, this past season, focused only on Pierce on local high school students in Los Angeles.

After all, so many high school students enter college every year, so many college students participate in the draft every year, and after the draft reform, only 54 players enter the NBA by draft every year.

Paying attention to Zhang Hao, Jerry West kept in mind this high school student who could become a missing pearl in high school.

Next, even if Zhang Hao can't go to the NCAA Division I to play, the secondary league ...... Jerry West doesn't think there's anything wrong with it, and he may still get the most resources and performance opportunities because he doesn't have other talents; The disadvantage is that the NBA does not pay so much attention to the minor leagues, and there will be some attention, and there are so many NCAA minor league players who are selected by NBA teams every year, but Jerry West wants this, if Zhang Hao is too high and has a lottery talent, then he has no treasure to pick up.

Of course, it depends on whether Zhang Hao can continue to improve in college, a high school student with top off-ball talent......

Jerry West is happy to discover a genius in the dust, but Mitch Kupchak doesn't understand why this teacher and boss is so happy, and Carter's talent is not enough to make him so happy, right? No matter how good Carter is, he can't be better than Mike Bibby's future top pick candidate, right?

……

On the evening of April 27, the McDonald's All-Star High School Tournament came to an end, and the final MVP was won by a strong senior forward Devin George.

Sure enough, there was no splash, and the next morning, when Zhang Hao was looking for the news in the sports newspaper, he found a very small page on the sub-page, and talked about Devin George's data and winning the MVP of the McDonald's High School All-Star Game.

And under the headline of the Los Angeles Times, that is, the news after the Lakers defeated the SuperSonics, is the preview of the McDonald's high school slam dunk contest tonight!

It also posted the news that CNN was going to broadcast live, as well as the players and so on.

Zhang Hao has been training for the past two days, and he found out that he was used by McDonald's to attract the Chinese community to watch the show, which made him happy, which basketball player doesn't want to be noticed?

In his opinion, the flying devil at Wake Forest University, who did not want to be named, created a "I don't care about popularity" character, but he did all crazy fan things.

This year, the Clippers, the 76ers, the Pistons...... Several teams played badly for him, but people didn't come, and Zhang Hao estimated that another group of teams would explode their mentality next year.