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A big wind

Ivan Chiriaev lives just down the road from me in Oakville, Ont. - the birthplace of my wife Leslie.

Things sure have changed there since I used to play highschool basketball against teams from that little burg on the lake, because the 7-foot-1 star for the St. Thomas Aquinas Raiders, a Catholic secondary school basketball team, confirmed yesterday he wants to skip university and enter the 2004 National Basketball Association draft.

Confirmed? More like announced he'll allow a team to draft him.

One things for certain - he sure acts like he's NBA ready. He sounds like a creep:

"The NBA wants and needs Ivan Chiriaev," the 19-year-old said at a news conference.

Chiriaev moved to Canada 16 months ago from Russia to live with an uncle in Oakville and pursue a basketball future.

"I've been able to go from nowhere in Russia to this day with hard work,'' said the 19-year-old. "I have a great opportunity to go right to the top and there's no player in the world with my size who can play guard."

Maybe he can play guard - who knows, but apparently even at 7' 1" and playing against boys - he can't score either. He averaged only 16 points in just over half the games he played for his 25-11 Halton Region school team.

You would think with a guy ready for the NBA he'd be a bit more of a scoring force.

Regardless - by announcing for the draft, he all but closed closed the door to any potential scholarship. Ivan said he had narrowed his choice of universities to a tidy five: Florida, LSU, Memphis, Syracuse and Iowa State. The winner, he said, would have been Iowa State, because it had the foresight to promise him he could play all five positions.

"They were rebuilding for me and I could have made them one of the top 10 in the country," he said.

An NBA sized ego anyway. He's getting set to put his prodigious skills on display. There's a USA basketball event coming up that pits the world's best against the top U.S. high school players in an under-20 exhibition game.

"I will be the leader of the World team at the Hoops Summit,"
"America and the world will get to see me play."

Now - maybe this guy is the second coming of Magic Johnson - another tall point guard, albeit three inches shorter than the great Ivan, but doesn't this guy come off like the youngest ever: