Still finding a home

In just a little more than two seasons in the National Basketball Association, Dan Dickau has been traded five times. He was forced to lawyer up over the summer in order to get out of a sticky rental home lease in the Bay Area. He is currently living alone in a New Orleans hotel room.

Prior to this weekend, he hadn’t seen his wife and baby daughter in almost three weeks.

Still, the former Gonzaga University All-American refuses to snivel about the nomadic lifestyle he and his young family have experienced since the Sacramento Kings made him the final first-round pick in the 2002 NBA Draft – and then promptly shipped him to the Atlanta Hawks.

Perhaps that draft-day trade should have alerted Dickau to what was to come.

Since then, he has landed – albeit briefly, in some cases – on the rosters of four other NBA teams: Portland, Golden State, Dallas and the New Orleans Hornets, who are cutting his paychecks these days.

He’s been blindsided by almost every trade.

“Each one, except for the Portland trade, really caught me off guard,” Dickau admitted earlier this week in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where the Hornets lost back-to-back games against the Clippers and Lakers.

“I wasn’t ready for any of those others. But I feel better about things now, because I’m pretty sure I’m going to be in New Orleans the rest of the season.”

It helps, too, that for the first time in his short NBA career, he’s playing some meaningful minutes.

After averaging less than 8 minutes in the 97 games he played with Atlanta, Portland and Dallas prior to being traded to New Orleans on Dec. 3, Dickau has become a major contributor for the struggling Hornets, who are a woeful 2-23 and already 18 games behind Southwest Division-leading San Antonio in the NBA’s Western Conference.

In 11 games with New Orleans, the 6-foot, 190-pound Dickau, who was named a first-team All-American by both the Associated Press and John R. Wooden Award committee as a senior at Gonzaga, has averaged 25.5 minutes, 12.1 points and 3.2 assists per game.

In mid-December, he scored a career-high 23 points in a 98-89 win over Golden State – the team that acquired him from Portland over the summer and then quickly dealt him to Dallas, leaving him holding an expensive lease on a rental home in Walnut Creek, Calif., until late this fall.

He played a career-high 39 minutes in a 100-91 overtime loss to the Los Angeles Clippers on Tuesday night.

“Those are Gonzaga-like minutes,” Dickau said, adding that it “feels great” to finally be getting a chance to exhibit his considerable talents.

“I was kind of bouncing around from place to place for a while, and that was tough – especially for my family. But I never lost faith in my ability or my game, knowing all along that I just needed to be in a place where I could get a chance to prove what I could do.

“It’s hard to show what you can do when you only get two or three minutes a game. You feel like you have to hit that first jump shot or make that first pass a perfect one. But now I can kind of let the game come to me, because I know I’m going to get more shots and more opportunities. There’s not as much pressure to make a great play right off the bat.”

The fact that the Hornets reactivated veteran point guard Baron Davis, who had missed 18 games with a inflamed disc in his lower back, this week probably means fewer minutes for Dickau in the immediate future.

But he did get his first start of the season against the Lakers on Wednesday night and played 33 minutes – many of them alongside Davis as part of a backcourt combination Dickau hopes Hornets coach Byron Scott will learn to like.

“I think I’ve played well enough to stay in the regular rotation and still get good minutes,” Dickau said. “Coach Scott has seen that I can hit open shots, that I can get in a lane and kick the ball out and that I understand the offense and know how to run it.

“I think Baron and I could play together quite a bit.”

Whatever Dickau’s future holds, he has not been shy about seizing the opportunity afforded him in New Orleans. In seven of his 11 games with the Hornets, he has put up at least 10 shots, launching a career-high 16 in a Dec. 8 loss to the New York Knicks.

He admits that part of his aggressiveness on offense stems from the fact that he is in the final year of the three-year guaranteed contract he signed with Atlanta the day of the 2002 draft and is looking to become a free agent at season’s end.

“My fourth-year option wasn’t picked up because I bounced around so much,” Dickau said. “No team in a position to pick it up had a good enough feel for me and how I play, and I completely understand that.

“You look at it now, and yeah, I’m playing with the idea that next year I could be a free agent. But you can’t dwell on it. If you let that uncertainty become a part of your mindset, you’re doing yourself a disservice. To succeed at this level, you’ve got to be focused on playing the game each night.”

The task is made more difficult, in Dickau’s case, by being separated from his wife Heather, and their 6 ½-month-old daughter Claire, who are living back in Vancouver, Wash., where Dan and Heather were high school sweethearts.

Shortly after being traded to the Hornets, Dickau took his wife and daughter to New Orleans, looking for a place to live.

But with the Hornets having played seven road games in the three weeks since Dickau arrived, there has been little time for apartment hunting.

“And we both decided that a hotel room was no place for a baby,” Dickau said.

So Heather and Claire returned to the Pacific Northwest where, according to Dickau, both sets of grandparents are “having a blast” watching his daughter grow up, while he continues to miss those milestone moments like a first word – “Mama” – while trying to establish himself in the NBA.

“Because of all the travel in the league, it’s just part of the deal,” Dickau said. “But it’s difficult when you have to go two or three weeks without seeing them.”

His loneliness was eased over the Christmas holiday, however, when he was able to fly to Vancouver following Wednesday night’s loss to the Lakers and spend some 30-plus hours with his family before rejoining the Hornets today.

“I can’t wait,” Dickau said prior to returning home to Vancouver. “Claire is the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen, and it’s really cool to see how much she changes in just a couple of weeks.”

Dickau plans to eventually bring his wife and daughter back down to New Orleans and settle into an apartment.

But because of his hectic schedule, there is no timetable for the family’s move.

Which means Heather, who rarely missed a Hawks home game during the couple’s pre-Claire stay in Atlanta, will have to continue following her husband’s career through television and newspaper reports.

“Heather has been awesome through the whole thing of getting traded again,” Dickau said. “She believes in me completely, and when we first got to New Orleans she told me, ‘Hey, you just need a place to play, and this could be the place.’ “

Which it has turned out to be – for now, at least.