Bob Hurley, with clipboard, said he has players from Brooklyn and the Bronx on his St. Anthony of Jersey City high school team. “It’s a phenomenon that we talk about all the time,” he said. Ron Naclerio, who decades ago gave his heart to New York City high school basketball, had it broken early this year.
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Tyshawn Taylor, a New Jersey product who now plays for the Nets, compared basketball to rap music. "It was invented there or created and people got the big name from New York, but it’s expanded to a lot of different places.” “Jan. 13,” he said. “I woke up and the kid was gone.” His best player, a 6-foot-9 forward named Jermaine Lawrence, was an inside force for Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Bayside, Queens, where Naclerio has coached and won more than 600 games since 1981. In the middle of his junior year, Lawrence transferred to Pope John XXIII High School in Sparta, N.J., embracing a mantra that in recent years has beleaguered the once-renowned and so-called City Game of New York: Go west, large young man. “Every kid has a handler now, a street agent,” Naclerio said. “It’s gotten to the point where you have to rerecruit them every year.” It is no secret that high school basketball at its highest competitive levels in most places hardly functions in the way people middle age or older often romanticize or remember. Influenced by Amateur Athletic Union coaches and people affiliated with shoe companies and other outside interests, the best players often attend multiple schools, including preparatory academies, in a two-way recruiting frenzy that mimics what they will experience in college. The mechanics of the modern game have been particularly unkind in New York City, which has long prided itself as a cradle for basketball legends — from Connie Hawkins to Chris Mullin, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Bernard King. While the greater metropolitan area continues to develop talent, the flow to the N.B.A. from the city has slowed perceptibly. The reasons are varied and complex, but it has reached the point where New Jersey — which this season lost the Nets, formerly of East Rutherford and Newark, to Brooklyn — has become the bigger talent hotbed. The Nets and the Knicks will continue developing their city rivalry Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden, but on the scholastic level, New Jersey is trumping New York again and again. “It’s a phenomenon that we talk about all the time,” said Bob Hurley, whose program at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City has played a significant role in what he calls “a cultural shift.” St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark — where Hurley’s son Dan once coached — and St. Patrick High School in Elizabeth, N.J. (now the Patrick School). “I grew up in Jersey City and spent my early life going over to watch Connie Hawkins, Roger Brown, so many great players that I saw,” Hurley said. “It seemed everybody was from the city, but it started to evolve in the mid-to-late ’90s.” In the past 10 N.B.A. drafts, the number of first-round picks from New Jersey schools has been roughly double that of New York’s. In 2011, Kyrie Irving of St. Patrick was the top pick of the draft (Cleveland Cavaliers). In 2012, Michael-Kidd Gilchrist, also of St. Patrick, was the second pick (Charlotte Bobcats). Starting in 2002, when Jay Williams of St. Joseph of Metuchen was the second pick (Chicago Bulls), central and northern New Jersey schools have produced successful N.B.A. players like Luol Deng (Bulls), J. R. Smith (Knicks), Andrew Bynum (Philadelphia 76ers), Randy Foye (Utah Jazz) and Kenneth Faried (Denver Nuggets). In that same time, the best N.B.A. player to come out of New York would probably have to be Joakim Noah (Bulls), although he was part of the trend of city players relocating to New Jersey (the Lawrenceville School) to finish a scholastic career. This year, Shane Rector, a promising 6-foot-1 senior point guard, left St. Raymond High School for the Boys in the Bronx for South Kent School in Connecticut. The best of New York’s recently homegrown and developed professional players include Kemba Walker (Bobcats), Sebastian Telfair (Phoenix Suns) and Lance Stephenson (Indiana Pacers) — though the latter two, out of Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, have failed to live up to early acclaim. Currently, Lincoln features Isaiah Whitehead, who is 6-4 and is considered by some to be the next potentially great player from the city.
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