Like many young players, DeMar DeRozan knew his place in this NBA lockout: be strong by staying silent. Listen to the veterans and sacrifice now as others had for him before.
He kept up with the lockout, but mostly the high-flying guard from USC just waited. That was hard enough, because DeMar DeRozan is a basketball player. It's his life, not just his job.
So now that the lockout is almost over, he can finally speak on just how hard it was.
"We've been dying without it," DeRozan said.
His childhood friend, Oklahoma City Thunder guard James Harden, put it this way: "I feel like I just got drafted again."
Even veterans like Los Angeles Lakers forward Matt Barnes couldn't hide their excitement at the prospect of the NBA season starting Dec. 25: "We were jobless, you know? We didn't have nothing to do with our time, so we're excited to get back out there and do what we do best."
All three played in Baron Davis' charity game at Los Angeles Southwest City College on Sunday night. So long as the new collective bargaining agreement is ratified by the players' association later this week, it will be the last such charity game before training camps open Dec. 9.
There was talk of canceling the game in the first few hours after the NBA and the union reached a handshake deal on a new CBA late Friday. Things such as insurance concerns and injury risks were brought up. A couple of the bigger names who had initially signed on to play in the event -- Paul Pierce and Russell Westbrook -- dropped out. And understandably, free agents like former UCLA star Arron Afflalo elected to watch in street clothes.
But for the most part, everyone who said they wanted to play showed up. It meant something to them to play for a crowd that might not be able to afford season tickets at Staples Center, a crowd that hadn't grown disillusioned with them during the lockout.
And it meant even more that this game was in Los Angeles. No town in this country loves and needs the NBA more than L.A.
"It's not so much that these are our fans," said Davis, who was born in Compton, went to high school in Santa Monica, went to college at UCLA, played three seasons for the Los Angeles Clippers and spends his offseasons here. "These people are our family. This is where we grew up."
Earlier this year, when Los Angeles hosted the NBA All-Star Game, noted baseball writer and statistician David Schoenfield came up with a way of measuring which of the five so-called hoops meccas in America -- Los Angeles, New York, Indiana, North Carolina and Chicago -- was the center of the basketball universe. [http://sports.espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/news/story?page=universe/meccas/schoenfield]
Based on NBA, college and high school success and legacies, Los Angeles was a runaway winner. But that's only one way of measuring it.
Players from Los Angeles seem to sense how important basketball is to this town. Players who come here for college never leave. Even those who just pass through on road trips want to spend their offseasons here.
This isn't a recent phenomenon, and it's not just because the Lakers have won two of the last three NBA titles, or that Blake Griffin showed up two years ago. Although it would be criminal for this town to miss out on one of Kobe Bryant's last, best years or any of Griffin's first, best years.
L.A. has been a basketball town for decades. The NFL has neglected us for 20 years and mistreated us before that. Our college teams have been good over the years, but our allegiances are split too many ways. Only the Dodgers, during their heyday in the 1980s, could rival the NBA in popularity. And even then, basketball's ties into the community ran deeper.
Leadership of the players who call L.A. home has passed down from generation to generation. Davis and Pierce are the leaders of this current group. Before them, Magic Johnson acted as godfather. His annual charity game, A Mid-Summer Night's Magic, was the event of the summer. Everyone from Michael Jordan to Larry Bird showed up.
When Davis and Pierce retire and hand off the baton, it'll likely pass to players like DeRozan, Harden, Nick Young, Afflalo and Westbrook.
It is considered an honor and a responsibility, and it is as much about supporting each other as it is about making sure basketball maintains its connection to the community.
"We all meet every Friday and hang out and have lunch," Davis said. "We support each other's charities or play in each other's games.
"We've been talking about some of the things we can do to give back, so this game was set. Lockout or no lockout, this will definitely be an annual thing."
This year, though, it felt even more important to do something.
Every NBA player and owner has lost money in this lockout. But no matter how much they lost, fans and those who make their living at the margins of the NBA have lost more. Restaurant owners, arena workers and parking lot attendants near Staples Center have all no doubt suffered.
Players feel that, especially those who still live in the communities they grew up in. And while there is no way they can make up the losses, they can do things to let those people know they wish they could.
"The world is missing the game right now, and for the most part, they thought it was millionaires fighting against billionaires," Barnes said. "It was more than that. We were looking out for the younger generation coming up, and I hope fans can understand that.
"But we just have go out there and play basketball. It's what the world's been missing, it's what we've been missing, so we owe it to the fans and ourselves to go out there and play hard."
Sunday night, none of the players who showed up at Southwest College played all that hard. This was a show, not showtime. And besides, now is not the time to pull a hamstring or sprain an ankle.
But the fact they played at all said something. All other charity games had been canceled the moment that handshake agreement was reached Friday night.
The one in Los Angeles meant more, though, to the players involved and the town that raised them. Basketball means more here.
It is a part of this place, not just a game.
