West helping lead Hornets' rise By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports, January 4, 2008 from: http://0rz.tw/653vV As a young star at Wake Forest, Chris Paul would listen to his coach, Skip Prosser, raise his name over and over. Here's how David West played the game. Here's how David West worked. Here's how David West acted. "David West," Chris Paul sighed on a cell phone Thursday. 'He was all I ever heard about." Prosser had moved to the ACC out of the Atlantic 10, but his heart was forever with a self-made player who stayed four years at Xavier and made himself the National Player of the Year. A different breed of college coach, the late Prosser was a sincere, self-deprecating high-school history teacher who never played the part of the used-car salesman. When a kid connected with Prosser, it spoke something of his soul. "When Coach Prosser first got to Wake, he kept telling me about the young guy he got there," West said Thursday. "And I know the kind of guy that Coach recruited." Once Paul had been drafted to the Hornets in 2005, West had already been part of the worst team in the NBA. New Orleans had won 18 games. Hurricane Katrina had chased the franchise to Oklahoma City. The prospects of climbing into the Western Conference's elite felt like scaling Everest. For West, he was still waiting his turn on the Hornets bench. New Orleans had an old sage, P.J. Brown, starting at power forward. He took time to teach West to be a pro. Once Paul arrived in his third season, Hornets coach Byron Scott moved West into the starting lineup. They clicked. Part of it was the connection to Prosser, part of it was childhoods spent growing up in small North Carolina towns, and part of it just was just two young players resolved to transform a loser into winner. These days, Paul is unstoppable, a force of nature that has the Hornets on their best start in franchise history at 21-11. He has that gift of elevating everyone in his presence, which is why after one season with West, with the rest of basketball still suspicious, Paul told him, "I wouldn't want to play with another power forward in the league." Deron Williams had Carlos Boozer? Good for him, Paul insisted. He watched the way that West worked, the way he never cared about stats, about credit, about anything but what Scott kept preaching for the long run. He watched it all and knew that they didn't need go get him his Boozer, because they were developing one at 6-foot-9, 240 pounds. "All we've talked about the last few years here, is 'Close the gap,' " West said. This was a mandate to creep closer and closer to San Antonio, Dallas and Phoenix. One by one, they're climbing over teams and delivering notice. This goes for West, too. As discreetly as West's disposition, he's playing the ball of his life, scoring (19.3 points) and rebounding (9.6) at career-high clips. "He's going to be a 20 and 10 guy," Paul said. "Anything less from him and he knows I'm going to be upset." Around West, the talent has slowly and surely assembled. It is no coincidence that West's offensive game has blossomed – Paul calls him, "The 17-foot assassin" – because Peja Stojakovic and Mo Peterson are deep perimeter threats. Tyson Chandler has developed into a menace in the middle that they expected back with the Bulls. Yes, the Hornets’ bench is killing them and general manager Jeff Bower needs to be active on the trade front because there are too many teams with too much depth in the West. Payroll is always a concern with the cash-strapped Hornets, but Bower has done a marvelous job constructing these Hornets with a small scouting staff and limited resources. Bower has turned the Hornets into one of the can-do franchises in the sport, a culture that commands his locker room. Before he gets too busy making deals, he warns, "One of our strengths of our group has been shared experiences and that's worth something." Here's what Bower is talking about: The toughness bred into these Hornets across several seasons of nomadic basketball. Between New Orleans and Oklahoma City, they've been torn between two towns, two homes. When they played four home games in New Orleans a season ago, they had to travel into town the night before like the opponent. Essentially, they were away games. No one in the NBA has had to run a franchise out of moving boxes, like they've done from Charlotte to New Orleans, New Orleans to Oklahoma City. Nevertheless, the Hornets don't make excuses. They make progress. Now, they're back in New Orleans and the market, the economy, makes those empty seats tougher on a team that's closed within one game of the first-place Spurs in the Southwest Division. These vagabond Hornets have a fantastic spirit. This goes to Scott, a hard-ass, truth-telling coach and trickles to Paul and Chandler and, yes, West, who is the X factor in a conference of potent power forwards. The accumulated mettle of these Hornets has lot to do with a 12-5 record on the road, best in the conference on the way into Golden State on Friday night. "We don't complain about situations," West said. "We handle them." West is the one Hornet still around to remember a playoff season, an '04 run with Baron Davis as a teammate. Funny, but West remembers what they were saying about him in those days. Few had much faith in the possibilities of four-year college players in the pros. He doesn't get indignant because they said he wasn't tough enough to play down low, nor athletic enough to play outside. So, West listened and learned, worked and worked, and got a little lucky when Prosser, the late coaching angel, delivered him a heavenly point guard. Together, they traveled to North Carolina to bury their old coach this summer. They play the game, the way Prosser lived: with sincerity and resolve. "I was one of those guys who needed four years of college, and I was so lucky to have really good veteran guys when I got into the league who taught me to be patient, to learn to play the game, learn to act the right way," West said. "I learned that if you're willing to work in this league, there are no limits on you." The Hornets are closing the gap in the Western Conference, and so much of it surrounds the development of the one player who was there when this team was the worst, when the climb was the steepest. Chris Paul had been hearing about David West for a long, long time, and maybe this is the year when everyone else finally does, too. --

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