Rod Strickland Coaches Young Stars on the Ways of the N.B.A. Rod Strickland remembers his walk across the grand stage of the N.B.A. draft in June 1988. He had left DePaul after three years and was looking forward to a long-awaited career as an N.B.A. player. "I was anxious; I remember being real nervous," said Strickland, a former New York City high school star who is now on the basketball staff at Kentucky. It was just the idea of playing junior high school, high school, college and then to finally be in that situation where you're going to get drafted - having a feel for where you might go, but it's still an unknown. On Thursday night, the N.B.A."s new rookies will wait to hear their names called. They will rejoice, then walk across the stage, don the caps of their new teams and shake hands with Commissioner David Stern. They will exit and enter a world they have dreamed about for years. Yet no amount of lectures or cautionary tales can prepare them for the life they are about to enter. Strickland has tried. After three seasons on the staff at Kentucky and three at Memphis under John Calipari, Strickland, 45, has coached, tutored and mentored a number of N.B.A. stars. Later this week five members of Kentucky's national championship team could be drafted - two of them, Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, potentially among the first three picks. His advice has been consistent: don't be hung up on draft day. Focus on the journey. "We talk about the grind part, about what it takes to stay in that league, the commitment, the effort, the mental part of the game and everything else outside of the game, about what it takes to be great," Strickland said. "Most kids don't really know how tough it is to play in the league and stay in the league," he added. It sounds funny, but sometimes, it's easier to get to the league than it is to stay in the league. I don't think they understand that. When you walk across that stage, you think it's forever. You think there is no ending, but the ending can be 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years. You just don't know. Strickland will not attend this year's draft; he will be in Venezuela helping to coach the Dominican Republic national team in preparation for a preliminary Olympic qualifying tournament. But Strickland spent the season talking to the Kentucky players about the journey ahead, using as a guide the lessons he learned in 17 N.B.A. seasons. He has reminded them - as he has other players he worked with, like Derrick Rose and John Wall - that basketball is now their real job, their profession. They are like thousands of other college students entering the work force, although probably not as prepared after one or two years of college to handle the responsibility that comes with the territory. Punctuality and accountability matter. There are conduct clauses and dress codes. They are representing a corporation and working in a fishbowl industry where every misstep, every move will be scrutinized. Their value will be determined as much by what happens off the court as on it. Unlike most of their fellow students, they will be richly compensated right off the bat, but many will also be traded or waived or sent to the Development League. Strickland has been a great resource for N.B.A.-bound players at Memphis and Kentucky. Rather than standing before them as someone who always walked the straight and narrow, Strickland speaks candidly to them about the short- and long-term consequences of questionable behavior. "I tell them that all of the decisions you make now will affect you in the long run; that's the hardest thing to get them to recognize and believe," he said. If you make bad decisions early, those things can come back to haunt you. Strickland is part of a fading generation of players for whom the distance between street ball and the big stage was not so vast. He is reminiscent of the blues and jazz musicians once upon a generation, who learned and honed their craft more or less at the University of the Streets. Both processes have become more corporate, more standardized - music taught in colleges and basketball barnstorming replaced by manicured Amateur Athletic Union competitions and workouts.