Looking at Andrei Kirilenko on the basketball court, you would never know he is actually an animated and expressive man, driven by strong emotion. He has a deadpan, watchful expression, his deep-set eyes staring hard at Jerry Sloan to decipher his often highly idiomatic instructions. He doesn’t make faces or pump his fists or play to the crowd. He’s doesn’t showboat. When he is called for a questionable foul, he does not whine or smirk or shake his head or slam the ball to the floor.

When, for example, he is called for his sixth foul against the Knicks — tangled up with Allan Houston driving for the basket — Kirilenko’s facial expression translates into something like, “Mr.Referee, your call is a puzzlement.”

But Kirilenko’s impassive demeanor is deceptive. In fact, Andrei is a man of high emotion and high spirits -”a real live wire,” in the words of Jazz assistant coach Gordie Chiesa. Though he seems to swat away shots with bland disdain, in his soul he experiences a surge of feeling.

“When I block a shot, I act with great emotion. Afterward I feel great emotion. I like the reaction of the fans.”

His emotion clearly must communicate itself to the fans, because already he is one of their favorites. In an online Survivor-type poll, only Stockton and Malone stayed on the island longer than Andrei.

His bond with the fans is evident during a kids’ clinic late one March afternoon in the Delta Center. “I love kids,” (pronounced keeds), says Andrei, and it shows. All the while he’s running them through basic drills, he’s cracking jokes and clowning around. Afterwards, he stays on past the allotted time to sign proffered basketballs, shirts, game programs. He poses for an individual photo with each kid, and for each of the fifty photos he comes up with a different facial expression. Sweet smile. Click. Fierce glower. Click. Mock surprise. Click.

When the last kid has come away with Andrei’s autograph - all graceful loops and swooping flourishes, the upper strokes of the K reaching up to block the dot over the i - another queue has materialized. These are executives and salesman from the company that has sponsored the clinic, and they are more star-struck than the kids. Andrei mugs some more, his repertoire of expressions putting Robin Williams to shame.

One executive shows his signed shirt to another executive. “I had him write hello in Russian,” he says, holding the shirt up for his friend’s inspection. Meanwhile, the line of adult fans doesn’t seem to diminish. Are they going back twice? But Andrei is unperturbed, and keeps signing souvenir balls and mugging for the camera. With the kids he remained seated. Now he stands up, but leans down to get his face somewhere in the vicinity of the fan, sometimes even resting his head on a shoulder and feigning sleep.

Finally there are no more basketballs to sign, though if pedestrians from 3rd West had been dragged into the Delta Center, Andrei no doubt would be accommodating, signing and mugging through the night and well into the next morning.

The fans now are drifting home, the session concluded. Then someone hollers, “How about a group picture?” and the dispersing fans collapse back on to the floor, where Andrei sits cross-legged at center court. He changes his pose for every shot, now pretending to nap, now sticking his Sharpie into his mouth at a jaunty angle, exhaling steams of imaginary smoke. It’s Ivan Drago doing Groucho Marx. (Incidentally, Andrei was recently voted sexiest man in Russia; the female honor went to Anna Kournikova.)

Jazz media relations assistant Cindy Edman marvels at Kirilenko’s willingness to participate in these extracurricular and occasionally tedious activities. “Andrei’s amazing,” she says. “He’ll do whatever we ask him to. And the nice thing is, he has such a great time.” Gordie Chiesa seconds that emotion: “Andrei is happy-go-lucky and he’s happy to be in America. It’s refreshing to see someone who hasn’t been spoiled by American coddling and who doesn’t have a sense of entitlement.”

Andrei Gennady Kirilenko has surprised almost everyone with his poise and good humor. (Someone not surprised is Rusty LaRue, who played with Andrei for CSKA Moscow of the Northern European Basketball League. “He’s a lot more sophisticated and Americanized than people realize.”) Everyone mentions his wit and his playful personality. He has quickly picked up on the fact that American sportswriters are fair game for razzing. After an early season game, he points toward a pizza delivery jalopy and asks a reporter, “Is that your car?”

Andrei is also practiced, despite the language barrier, in the sort of relentless banter engaged in by professional athletes. Asked for a comment on how Andrei gets along with his teammates, Scott Padgett breaks into a sly grin. “He fit in quickly. We kid him about not always understanding what we’re supposed to be doing. Guys on the bench will imitate him when he puts his hands out and shrugs, like “what’s going on here?’”

In the mimicry department, Andrei gives as much, or probably more, than he gets. He does a good John Starks, for instance, and he is dead-on with impressions of assistant coach Gordie Chiesa and Head Coach Jerry Sloan.

“That is correct, that is correct,” he says, somehow managing to nail Chiesa’s distinctive New York patter. And his impression of Sloan is uncanny, capturing the coach’s rangy angular gait as well as his baleful locker room stare. “DeShawn,” rumbles Andrei-as-Jerry,”I want you to move through.”

Kirilenko gets on famously with the wider public, as well as with the immediate Jazz family. When he is out shopping -”For shopping at ZCMI, for groceries at Dan’s” he is easily recognized. “Especially,” he says with a chuckle, pointing to his black warm-ups, “if I wear this Jazz label.” Everyone has been very friendly. “They are smiling all the time, wishing you good luck and good health.”

Someone who was not smiling all the time was a policeman who interrupted one of Andrei’s trips from the Delta Center to his house near Millcreek Canyon, a distance equivalent to that between the Voikovskaya and Dinamo subway stations in Moscow. But he had good reason to be traveling He at 94 miles per hour in his silver convertible Porsche, license plate AK 27.

“Sometimes you are in a hurry, and when the cop stopped me, I said ‘Officer, my wife is feeling bad. She is pregnant and I am hurrying home to see her.’ But still he checked my car and gave me a ticket. I am thinking that is the big difference between America and Russia. In Russia if you are in a hurry you can just pay your fine to the officer and go. Here they stop you and write you a ticket and then you have to go to school to pay fewer dollars.” It’s no surprise that Andrei went ahead and paid the full $300.

On February 20, two days after Andrei’s twenty-first birthday, his wife Masha gave birth to a boy, who weighed in at 8 pounds 2 ounces, and measured twenty inches, which happens to match Andrei’s size at birth. “Before the baby was born, we thought about naming the baby Jazz if a boy, and Utah if a girl. But my parents were crazy with the idea, so we did a traditional Russia name, Feodor. Pronounced in Russian FYO-DOOR.”

Andrei didn’t leave Masha’s side when she was in the hospital having the baby. “For two nights in the Regional Hospital, I sleep next to her, on a small mattress on the floor. It is now a big responsibility. I’m not free now, I must keep care.”

Masha has played a big role in Andrei’s successful first season. Before she had their baby, she traveled with him on road trips, something wives do not ordinarily do. During games he catches her eye. “I see her in the stands and send her a secret signal. Masha helps with my emotion. Sometimes I need emotion and help.” Though Masha is far more fluent in English-she in fact has taught English in Russia - he doesn’t really need her help with the language. His syntax may have a Slavic slant to it, but he often brings a foreign - speaker’s ability to use the precise word, as when he describes Shaquille O’Neal as a “master of the game.” Nevertheless, there she is just off camera, wearing headphones and giving him emotion, when Hot Rod Hundley interviews him after the Jazz victory over the Lakers in March.

Andrei keeps in constant touch with his family and friends in Russia. “Of course I talk to parents every day. [Andrei comes naturally by his athletic talent: his father, Gennady, was a soccer player, and Olga, his mother, played basketball.] In Russia it is plus ten hours or minus fourteen. For example, it is now 4:22 A.M. in Russia. Sometimes people call me when I am asleep. I pick up phone and say, ‘I am sleeping, good-bye.’”

Andrei talks often with childhood friends Nicolai Padius and Eugene Ivanov. “I buy phone cards for a long time. I punch in twenty-five, thirty numbers maybe. One eight hundred, then code numbers, then zero one one, then country code, then personal phone number. My fingers get a lot of practice.”

Naturally enough, Andrei is looking forward to returning home. “I miss the atmosphere of Russia.”

Kirilenko has exceeded expectation for his first year. The general feeling was that he would come along slowly, learn the system, educate himself in the NBA game. Injuries to Russell and Marshall may have provided him more playing time than anticipated, and he has used the opportunity to win the fans over with his energetic play, the chief feature of which at the present time is his astonishing ability to block shots. “From early on I like to block shots,” Andrei says. [His e-mail name, by the way, is “blockshoter.”]

There is something about blocking a shot that is deeply satisfying to the spectator - perhaps it is unexpected intervention in the ball’s predictable parabola toward the basket. In any event, a blocked shot always draws a reaction from the crowd. Often Kirilenko seems to appear out of nowhere to swat the ball away, as he did memorably against the Lakers in early March, when he materialized twice to deprive O’Neal of a routine lay - up.

Coaches like blocked shots, too, but they also look for more subtle indices of skill. “He still needs to improve in a lot of the nuances of the game,” says Jerry Sloan. “As he plays more, he’ll learn what we’re doing offensively and defensively,” adds Phil Johnson. “And he needs to work on his shooting, and build up his strength and conditioning.” (Note that Sloan and Johnson share a reluctance to give away the store when assessing talent.)

The irrepressible Gordie Chiesa is more forthcoming in his enthusiasm for Kirilenko. “His improvement? Light years! Consider this: here’s a kid, just turned 21 years old, operating in a foreign language, going through the rigors of the NBA, all the ups and downs, all the problems magnified. Andrei’s a great kid! He’s what I’d call a warm spirit. His teammates have all embraced him. He’s very coachable. He listens. He’s a gifted young man. On a team that’s average athletically, he stands out. When he goes to the basket he can change hands in mid-air [Kirilenko is ambidextrous-he writes with his left hand, shoots with his right]. Did you see that shot over his head? That was a Hornacek!”

Kirilenko realizes his good fortune to be playing for the Jazz. “It is a team more like European style basketball, with many plays. John and Karl, they are the two greatest tandem in the history of the league. I must just listen to their advices. They can be my fathers.”

An example of fatherly advice from Malone occurs late in the third quarter of a game against Denver. Andrei is whistled for a foul as he streaks down the edge of the court. While waiting for the foul shot, Andrei and Karl engage in an extended and animated tete-a-tete.

“I am telling him that I am not touching that player! But Karl is telling me we are not in a big rush and I should make sure to play inside of him.”

It is almost incomprehensible to Andrei that John and Karl have played as long as they have. They have been in the NBA for about as long as he has been alive. When he is their age, his son Feodor, a.k.a. Jazz, will be the age Andrei is now. (Imagine a Kirilenko father and son tandem.) But it boggles his mind to look that far ahead. “Of course, I am thinking about playing that long for the Jazz. I don’t like to be traded. But that is up to the fans, and up to Larry Miller.”

After a loss to the Knicks, Andrei dresses quickly while the media swarm all over John Stockton at the next locker. Masha is home tonight with the baby, and Andrei is eager to get back.

Someone has left a baby gift in a large yellow sack next to his locker, but he is too much in a hurry to even read the card. He grabs the paperback novel he has been reading for weeks-”I have no free time to look at book”- and stuffs it in the yellow sack, along with a vita-something-or-other protein drink. From the shelf above his locker he plucks an amber bottle of prescription medicine -For a cough? Allergies to American flora? - and sticks it in the pocket of his functional black leather jacket.

He’s almost out of the locker room when trainer Terry Clark catches up with him and asks if he has his medication and reminds him the Jazz are leaving the next morning from Millionaire aviation. “Sure, sure,” says Andrei as he ducks out the door.

But before he can make a quick cut down the corridor to the parking lot, a platoon of bearded Russians in red parkas descend upon him. They are in town for the Paralympics, and have made a pilgrimage to the Delta Center to see Kirilenko, or “Fitya,” his nickname in Russia. (“It is because I look like brother of player named Fitisof,” explains Andrei).

The Russians form a respectful semi-circle in front of him, and for the next twenty minutes an animated discussion takes place, full of grand gestures and hearty laughs. The Russians have brought greetings from Valentino Bashkirova, Andrei’s famous coach at the Trinta Junior Olympic Reserve Basketball School. Each of his countrymen has also brought a flash camera, and they all seem to use up at least a roll apiece taking pictures of Andrei. He obligingly poses with each man, then groups of two, then groups of three, four, and five. Finally the entire group gathers for a portrait.

Sweet smile. Click. Fierce glower. Click. Mock surprise. Click. Feigned sleep. Click. At last, after back slaps, embraces, and heartfelt farewells, Andrei hurries down the concrete corridor, hoping no policeman pulls him over before he gets home to Masha.

Meanwhile, the Russians in red parkas are positively giddy. “In Russia,” says one of the men, “Kirilenko is on the front page for every Jazz match. He is hero.”

Dan Sorenson is a senior Writer for HomeCourt magazine.