Len Overcomes Rookie Year Surgeries and Strife

If it seems like Alex Len is moving more freely, it’s due to the startling lack of burdens compared to just a year ago.

It’s easiest to see after a game. The 7-1 center no longer sits bowed over aching feet buried in ice bags. His right hand is devoid of cumbersome wrappings, sporting only a pair of tape straps around his ring and pinkie fingers as the only signs of its previous misfortune.

Len is randomly and warmly addressed by a teammate. Another jokingly refers to Len’s long-limbed defense and how drastically it made an opposing player alter his shot. Len laughs in agreement at what is said, then continues his postgame routine. The entire scene unfolds with a quiet, growing confidence that, though subtle, brings about a startling change in the second-year player.

Because Year One, by any measure, could hardly have been worse.

Just two weeks earlier, Len had confidently announced he would declare for the NBA Draft. His college head coach, Mark Turgeon, had given his full support of the decision. After all, how often do skilled seven-footers come along? After putting up 11.9 points, 7.8 rebounds and 2.1 blocks per game for Maryland, his draft stock was widely acknowledged as high-and-getting-higher.

“I know it’s going be different,” Len admitted. “It’s going be a lot of hard work, but I think I’m ready to compete and contribute to teams. When I came here two years ago, I improved so much that it’s not going be hard to make the step to the NBA.”

Only now, he’d have to make that step without a good left foot. Len had quietly been playing in pain throughout the latter portion of his sophomore season, and the cause had finally been discovered: a partial stress fracture in his ankle.

To preserve his long-term health, he opted for surgery. The immediate sacrifice was that Len would not be able to play for four-to-six months, a period that guaranteed his absence in the NBA Summer League and put his training camp and even season-opener statuses in doubt.

Well before his rookie season even started, medical news again rudely butted in just weeks after an NBA high. Len, who was projected to go as high as No. 1 overall, had been taken fifth by Phoenix on June 27.

This was a big deal not just for Len, but for the Suns as well.

“When you can get a guy that’s 7-1 and can do things defensively like block shots and take up space with that wingspan, but also has a good offensive game, it’s something you don’t see very often,” said Suns Head Coach Jeff Hornacek. “He has both sides of the game and that’s what helps make us feel really excited about the guy. He’s not one dimensional.”

Unfortunately, neither were Len’s foot issues. A closer inspection by the Suns medical staff revealed the need for Phoenix’s new rookie to undergo “precautionary” surgery on his other ankle.

Still, Len and the Suns were confident he would be ready for the start of the regular season.

The feet were still hurting.

That was all Len knew less than a week into the regular season. Despite an entire summer of rehab along with treatment from arguably the best medical staff in the NBA, pain still lanced through his surgery-scarred foundations.

The physical and mental toll of his recent bad luck had shown in the token minutes he was able to contribute. In the four games he’d actually played, his trademark footwork and instincts on either end of the floor had deserted him, only to be replaced by halting, cumbersome movements.

This was frustratingly unfamiliar territory for Len, who at one point in his young life had contributed his natural balance and grace to gymnastics. Now, he was forced to sit out for weeks at a time just to let time finish what the surgery had started.

“Before, I would play a couple games and it would get so bad and worse that I would have to sit out a couple game,” Len said. “So we decided to just let it heal and then come back and play the rest of the season.”

It’s easy to forget that even now, Len is a relative newcomer to the United States. He moved here (Maryland, specifically) for college in 2011. His Ukrainian accent, however, is slight enough that it’s barely detected half the time he is talking.

Make no mistake, however. Len loves his home country, and specifically the family he left there. His mother spent a large portion of the season in Arizona to help with his NBA/adult transition, but he Skyped every day with his father and talked as often as he could with his grandparents.

Late in 2013, that communication became a nervous, stress-inducing necessity. Ukraine had plummeted into civil unrest following a rejection of an EU bill, and hundreds of thousands of protesters had swallowed the capitol city of Kiev.

Ukraine, which had been largely a peaceful, tourist-friendly destination in south-east Europe, had been plunged into chaos.

For Len, this was a double-dose of emotional torture. Since taking up basketball at 13 years old, the court had held solace for the large-but-reserved young man. Worries, troubles, anything that weighed on Len’s mind could be muted by simply playing with a ball and a hoop.

Problem was, he couldn’t even do that.

“Last year was probably the toughest year in my career,” Len said. “I wanted to get out there, but I couldn’t."  

Every day, Len would practice a lot – usually more than anyone on the team, in fact – and play little.

Every night, he would contact his family in Ukraine, hoping beyond hope that their familiar faces and voices would come through unmarred by the chaos surrounding them.

On the court, Len was seeing the short-term consequence of his early-season absence. The Suns had found an identity without him, one that had seen them into the thick of the Western Conference playoff race. Playing behind Miles Plumlee and Channing Frye, there were little minutes to be had.

Len flashed occasional glimpses of the potential for which he was drafted. A crunch-time tip-in at Boston for the win. Nine points and five rebounds in 11 minutes against Orlando.

But these were token spells awarded only when the game was already in hand or if the team had no other options in the middle.

Off the court, Len could hardly avoid the now-constant updates on his homeland. It was especially difficult if the team was traveling. Airport telivisions mercilessly showed the charcoal-colored guns, billowing smoke and ragged faces of his people.

Again, Len was only 20 years old, part of an age group that isn’t keen to embrace or even understand the ugly world of politics.

“It’s really confusing too, because if you watch Russian, American and Ukrainian news, everybody says different things about what’s going on over there,” he told NBA.com. “I’m not really into politics. For me, personally, I just want everybody to kind of stay together. It’s crazy. The country is just falling apart.”

This summer was supposed to be big for Len, mostly because of the Las Vegas Summer League, Here, he would finally get the plentiful in-game experience that had been so hard to come by.

For the first time in a while, Len had multiple reasons to feel optimistic. He was healthy, the pain in his feet completely gone. He had flown his grandparents to Phoenix once the troubles in Ukraine had peaked too high. His troubles had, it appeared, been resolved.

Until the first game of summer league, when Len’s pinkie finger got caught in a Golden State player’s jersey. He immediately felt pain shoot through it. Later that day — ironically, exactly one year after undergoing his second ankle surgery — it was official: the finger was broken. He would miss the rest of summer league.

Just like that, bad luck had reared its ugly head and bitten Len again. It was the kind of blow that could make most 21-year-old kids wonder whether they were simply cursed, doomed to suffer bad break after break.

The last time Alex Len matched up with Tim Duncan, it had been a preseason game more than a year earlier. He’d been a rookie then, one saddled with foot pain and uncertainty, neither of which comes in handy against the player you idolized as a kid.

Those thoughts were not on Len’s mind now. He was too busy embracing his new role on the team, which had overcome a second pinkie fracture before his second season even started. Frye had moved on in free agency, and he was suddenly the primary and only true backup center on the roster.

When Plumlee got into foul trouble early in the first quarter, Hornacek motioned for Len to enter.  In the middle of the second quarter, he called on Len again, only this time it was out of choice and not necessity.

Pitted against Duncan the majority of the game, Len finished with 10 points and 11 rebounds, the first double-double of his career.

“Alex plays hard every day after practice,” Hornacek said after the game. “We see it over and over. The way he was playing with his length had a real effect on the game…he had a heck of a game, playing for us.”

Len has become arguably the most vital piece to the Suns’ bench. His long-limbed defense forces opposing players to alter their shots in almost comical fashion. Simply holding his ground and extending his arms straight up, Len forms a single-man wall against which a clear shot simply isn’t possible.

He’s also getting more comfortable with his offensive game. The last two contests (L.A. Clippers and Boston) have seen him set consecutive career-highs in scoring at 17 and 19, respectively. He is naturally revealing a mid-range jumper he hits all the time in practice, but for some odd reason could never find the mark last season.

The assertiveness is also there. Len’s twice-injured pinkie has since discarded the soft splint it sported earlier in the season. With only the latter two fingers taped together, he is squeezing the ball assertively when rebounding, catching or dunking. The latter action is becoming a trend as he develops chemistry with the Suns’ guards, all of whom are learning that Len is usually waiting with hands ready in an open pocket near the rim.

“We couldn’t see what he could do [last season],” said Suns guard Goran Dragic. “Now we can see the whole package.”

It’s Len’s confidence that has his teammates’ attention, however. While still reserved in general, he is no longer timid.

Dragic was a small child when political upheaval morphed Yugoslavia into a myriad of smaller countries, including his own Slovenia. He remembers his grandparents’ house being burned down, seeing his father start every time the house phone rang, wondering if it meant a loved one had been lost. It leaves him all the more impressed with how Len has dealt with his own challenges.

“He went through those surgeries, rehab and then with what happened back home,” Dragic said. “If you just look at those three things, you can see he’s really tough mentally. He’s a great, great guy.”

All is not solved in Ukraine, nor does it appear it will be anytime soon. Len still communicates with his family as often as possible, but having seen to his grandparents earlier this year diminished the feeling of helplessness he used to experience.

Everything he experienced over the last year-and-a-half has left Len scarred in more ways than one. He is still only 21 years old, but it is an old 21 years. He has been forced to grow up fast, and only now, with an increased role, is that process happening where he wants: on the court.

“I’m feeling healthy. I’m feeling great out there.”