Brandon Jennings hopes his European adventure pays off

It had been a challenging year since Jennings and Knox heard the famed basketball businessman Sonny Vaccaro on the radio espousing a creative deviation to the NBA's three-year-old rule requiring high school seniors to wait a year before entering the draft. Vaccaro reckoned that some prep sensation ought to make some money overseas against professionals, and Jennings had dialed up Vaccaro and wound up doing so, signing with Lottomatica Roma for $1.2 million.

There had been the dregs of the middle of November, from which Jennings recalls being exhausted on his bed in a nadir. "I was just mentally, 'I can't do this much more,' " he said. And, "I got a little homesick. For everything, for being around my friends. I wasn't playing as much. The American lifestyle. Food. It was a lot of things all built up."

There had been the pining of March, which is recalled as a rough patch. "You know when it was tough for him?" said Kris Stone, who, as an executive for Under Armour, the apparel company that endorses Jennings, had "a lot of, lot of, lot of" phone conversations with him. "When he started to see his buddies in the NCAA tournament" -- Kemba Walker, Tyreke Evans -- "and a lot of these kids were playing on ESPN and he's seeing them and it was almost like Brandon was being forgotten."

There had been the snags of foreign life, trivial matters that can pile up, things Americans don't ponder when they envy those on grand adventures. As Stone put it, "It's an adjustment to not have a dryer."

It's not a plague, but it's one blip, and the blips add up and, Stone said, "wear on you after a while" and you have to "adjust or go back home."

There was no road map for how to do this, and then this thing about playing time -- which you may have heard can concern wildly talented, diligent young males from time to time. "He wasn't used to not playing and he wasn't used to not playing 25 or 30 minutes a night," Stone said. "Just a huge shock."

Stone extolled Knox and said, "If it wasn't for Alice, you know, who knows?"

As Lottomatica Roma finished a 20-10, second-place season -- it would lose in the playoff quarterfinals -- its coach, Nando Gentile, finished a news conference in a spartan, classroom-style setting, then said of Jennings in English, "For me, he's one of the best talents in Europe." And: "For me, he's very young for this [league]. He needs more years in this [league]."