[CHRON]Baxter willing worker

Playing time less important than having job
By JONATHAN FEIGEN
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/sports/bk/bkn/3387621

The Rockets could not offer Lonny Baxter much of a promise that there would be playing time at power forward.

Stromile Swift had been signed as a prized free agent. Juwan Howard was coming back from his knee injury and a heart condition. They would leave few minutes unclaimed.

Center was even more crowded. Yao Ming surely would grab all the playing time he could handle, with Dikembe Mutombo, back from a remarkable season of rebirth, behind him.

And if the Rockets chose to go small, they likely would look to someone with Swift's ability to challenge gravity, a quality Baxter does not share.

But Baxter was not looking for minutes. That had become a luxury he could not demand. He had been bounced around and finally out of the NBA. He simply wanted — and the Rockets offered — a job.

"After being out of the league, if you get a guaranteed contract, you're not really worried about where or who's in front of you," Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy said. "When you're out, being in anywhere is pretty good. Very few of these guys, when they're in as rookies, realize you can get out and stay out, not get another shot. Getting a second shot is difficult.

"There's always a new crop of guys that people get infatuated with. It's hard. I feel for guys like him."

So Baxter, after a starring turn with the team's summer league entry in Minneapolis, signed with the Rockets when they made an offer of a guaranteed contract he was in no position to refuse, then worried about where he would fit in.

"Of course, I gave it some thought," Baxter, 26, said. "But I'm just here to work and do my job. I'm not worried about stuff like that. I just try to get in and do everything I can.

"This team is a team of great talent. I have guys I can push, and who push me to make me better."

So far in Rockets practices, he has largely worked at center, predominantly against Yao, whom he has found tough to push around.

"He's tough to move," Baxter said. "He's a heavy guy."

Baxter, though slimmer since July in Minneapolis, is a heavyweight himself, bringing 260 pounds in his 6-8 frame.

That could allow him to offer a more physical defender than the players that fill roster slots in front of him, along with the requisite catch-and-shoot ability the Rockets value for role players fitting in around Yao and Tracy McGrady.

"I just come in with the same attitude every day and come to practice ready to work," Baxter said. "I know nothing is guaranteed. You just have to work hard. But I always knew that."

The Rockets seem to include him in their plans. When Rockets general manager Carroll Dawson spoke of his offseason free-agent additions Swift and Derek Anderson, he frequently included Baxter in the same breath, even correcting one question that excluded Baxter by saying, "Don't forget Lonny Baxter."

"He's going to have to play a smarter game (than other players)," Van Gundy said. "Certainly, he can score the ball. He's gotten himself in a lot better shape than he was in the summer.

"He does like to work. You have to have on your team workers and passers. If you have workers and passers, you have a pretty solid foundation.

"Defensively, he has to be able to talk and get himself in the right position because he is a little undersized.

"He's not under-strengthed, but he is under-lengthed. His athleticism is not going to get him out of mistakes like some guys' can."

But he has that chance. Whatever details followed that, getting another chance trumped them all.