No Slam Dunk by Mike Lupica

Author:Mike Lupica
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

WES AND THE HAWKS HAD a solid week of practice.

There were no problems between Wes and Dinero at practice. If you just watched them in scrimmages, and didn’t know anything about what had happened between them so far, you wouldn’t have believed there had ever been any problems between them.

It wasn’t as if they’d suddenly turned into Steph Curry and Kevin Durant, though.

They weren’t working together like that.

But without them talking about it, they were trying to work together, put it that way. As Emmanuel kept telling Wes, he and Dinero were a work in progress.

Now it was Saturday morning, the big court at Annapolis High and they were getting ready to play the Potomac Valley Rockets, and Wes was hoping that he and Dinero—and everybody else—would play like they’d practiced.

“Things were good this week,” E said as they were warming up.

“They’ve been good before, ’fore they turned bad,” Wes said.

E grinned.

“Someday,” he said, “if I’m really, really lucky, I hope to have a positive attitude like that.”

“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” Wes said. “Who said that?”

E laughed. “You!” he said.

“Maybe the one who’s a work in progress here is me,” Wes said.

“Tell me about it,” E said. “Sometimes you remind me about something my mom likes to say, about a sunny day looking for a cloud.”

“That’s not me, swear,” Wes said. “I come to every game hoping it’s gonna be the best we’re ever gonna play.”

“Hold that thought,” Emmanuel Pike said, and then Coach Saunders was waving them over and telling them it was time to huddle up.

“Now, this isn’t directed at any of you,” Coach said when they were all around him. “Fact is, it’s directed at all of you. But I want the ball to move today like it’s never moved before. I don’t want to see any ball stoppers out there. Because when that ball does move, we look like the best team in this whole league. When it doesn’t? Y’all still look like five guys on the playground who just met each other.”

He was slowly turning as he talked, so they all felt as if he were speaking directly to them.

“Understood?” he said.

Nobody said anything until Wes said, “Understood, Coach.”

Then he surprised himself by saying in a loud voice to his teammates, “Who is the best team in this league?”

“Hawks are!” they all yelled back at him.

The kid Wes was guarding today, and who was guarding him, was named Davon Gundy. The Rockets’ point guard, about the same size as Dinero, was named Paul Peters, with hair that was even more blond than Wes’s was, nearly white.

But they weren’t the players on the Rockets the Hawks were all looking at, because they were looking at the opposing center, Hassan Jones, who had to be the biggest player in the league, already six three even at the age of twelve. Emmanuel had looked him up on Facebook during the week.

Now E whispered to Wes, “Not sure they even measure that guy in feet and inches.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.