LAS VEGAS – The globalization of basketball means prodigies don’t stay hidden for long, no matter which continent spawns them. So when a 14-year-old started causing ripples in Senegal three years ago and a Spanish scout got on the trail, he made a pitch to Mamadou Samb’s mother.

“You want Mamadou,” the Senegalese mother of nine tall young boys told him, “you take Cheick, too.”

Which is the start of the story of how the Pistons might have come to find their big man for the next generation. It’s a story of many chapters with no reliable way yet to tell how it ends. But a significant clue gets delivered over the next 10 days in Las Vegas, where the truth often comes to die.

The Pistons acquired rights to the 7-foot-1 Samb on draft night 2006 from the Los Angeles Lakers for Maurice Evans, a swingman of proven worth. Hardly anyone knew anything about Samb then, but when he showed up at last year’s Las Vegas Summer League the grapevine soon hummed with the buzz surrounding the 22-year-old with a wing span that seemingly spans the Dark Continent.

Joe Dumars’ old Pistons running mate, Isiah Thomas, asked in amazement where he’d found Samb. An Eastern Conference GM called and offered a veteran guard who’d been a part-time starter and valuable contributor. All that for a player who’d toiled unspectacularly in Spain’s B League just a few years after picking up the sport at the urging of others in Senegal.

“When I’m young, I play football with my friends,” Samb said after a recent workout at the Pistons’ Auburn Hills practice facility. “And one day, every people, when I’m going out, saying to me, ‘Hey, you big. You have to play basketball.’ And I say, ‘Why I have to play basketball?’ I do try. I like basketball.”

Basketball appears to like him, too. Samb has natural shot-blocking skills, good footwork and an uncanny shooting touch for a big man. At the end of a two-hour workout under the eye of Pistons assistant and NBA Hall of Famer Dave Cowens, Samb shoots dozens of perimeter jumpers in an effortless arc. He runs with an easy gait and glides laterally with a fluidity uncommon to 7-footers.

The wild card, of course, is how he looks in a full-court game populated by nine other NBA bodies. The Pistons will be assessing that critically over the next 10 days, because it will go a long way toward determining whether they feel comfortable committing one of their 15 roster spots to the still-raw Samb. He has a year left on his contract in Spain, but it’s at Samb’s option. If the Pistons see a role for him and see the value in more closely monitoring and aiding his development, it’s possible Samb will be playing in the NBA come the fall.

The fact Samb is so new to basketball is both good news and bad for the Pistons. Though they have to teach him everything from the ground up, at least they have no bad habits to first deconstruct. And he’s a most willing learner, a kid with bright eyes, an easy smile and a quick intellect who apologizes for his English even though he communicates just fine in his fourth language. In addition to his native tongue, Samb speaks French and Spanish plus the English he’s picked up only since being drafted a year ago.

“He’s like a sponge,” said Cowens, who worked out with Samb last week for the first time. “He’s got a lot of upside. He’s a pretty coordinated kid for a big and he moves well. The biggest thing for him now is conditioning and the strength in the core of his body.”

Samb was listed variously at 195 to 215 pounds a year ago, but since getting his first taste of the NBA he’s become a weight-lifting devotee.

“Last year when I come to Summer League, my first time, I see a lot of players, like, strong,” – and here he holds his hands well apart to display broad shoulders – “and I be like this” – and here he holds up a long, spidery index finger. “Skinny. I see I got to work on legs to get more big and come back to Spain this season. I have a little pain in my foot – I no play. I lift and lift and lift. I weigh now like 12 kilos more – I don’t know in pounds.”

Twelve kilos to just over 26 pounds, and, in fact, Cowens looks at Samb, now somewhere around 235 to 240, and says, “We don’t want him to get too big (through the chest). With him it’s all between the knees and the core, the abdomen. That’s where he has to get stronger because that’s what controls all the movement.”

Cowens has seen hundreds of players with enough talent to crack the NBA come and go having left no impact. He’s not one to make snap assessments of a player’s future based on a few workouts.

He talks of the “weeding out” process that winnows the pool of thousands of talented basketball players to the relatively few who wind up making a handsome living at it. First comes the body and raw athletic ability that Samb obviously possesses. Then an athlete’s tolerance for pain and a body’s ability to absorb punishment. Then the ability to fine tune athleticism into skill. And finally a willingness to compete.

In his time with Samb, Cowens says “he’s here and he’s working hard. I like his demeanor. He’s friendly, but you can see he’s got a little bit of a nasty thing where he wants to compete. Now, how long he can sustain that is the next thing. He’s going to be playing against the best and the toughest. Bill Russell used to say there are some bad (SOBs) out there trying to make you look bad – don’t ever forget that.”

“He’s just in the beginning. But he’s got a chance. It’s all up to him. He’s certainly got the size, the length, the touch, the dexterity, the footwork – he’s got all that stuff.”

“Good coach,” Samb says of Cowens. “He shows me things I never know in basketball. Little, little, important things. I like to work with him.”

The Pistons arrived in Las Vegas on Wednesday, practiced twice Thursday and will do so again Friday before starting their five-game Summer League schedule Saturday against Philadelphia. Every practice, every game, every scrimmage will be another learning experience for Cheick Samb, another opportunity to write the next chapter in a story yet to take form.