MANILA, Philippines ? If I hear the stadium barker call out ??Tayshaun Prince? Andrada? one more time I will throw up.

Rookies should never have nicknames. They haven?t done anything to earn one. When you enter the UAAP, your high school reputation might as well be wiped clean. If the media finds something cute to say about your name (?Spider-man? Webb, ?Jai-namite?), resist the temptation to slap it on a baller ID, write it on your headband, or tattoo it on your shooting hand.

Until you?ve made a game-defining shot, sunk pressure free throws, or played more than 30 minutes, you?re basically a placeholder. Your odds of going down to Team B are the same as your odds of being yanked out of the game after back-to-back turnovers?in other words, high.

You have nothing to brag about, certainly not a neat nickname.

The only common thing with NBA champion Prince and the La Salle rookie Andrada is a wing-span disproportionate to their height. Prince plays suffocating defense, posts up smaller forwards, hits triples, runs out the floor, and can fairly be called a glue guy who does a bit of everything any NBA squad would be happy to have. Andrada had four fouls by the first few minutes of the third quarter, did not score, and did not block a shot (of course, I say this without benefit of a box score in front of me. For all I know, he could have had a steal).

This is not an indictment of Andrada, nor should you think it a personal attack. Truth is, Andrada is but a manifestation of a bigger problem that will plague this UAAP season for at least half of the games: too many rookies. Over 40 of them.

Saturday?s opening ceremonies gave way to excruciating basketball. Somewhere in the middle of third quarter of the opening game between Adamson University and the University of Santo Tomas, a malevolent Death Eater on his way back to London cast a spell of sloppiness over the Araneta Colliseum. Players began dribbling on their foot, passing to players on the other team, and shooting like they had cannons strapped to their arms (they didn?t).

Shots went 3/4s of the way in and then decided to jump back out. Point-blank lay-ups hit the back iron and dribbled out. Teams traded passes over to people in the stands. And amid that calamitous quote-unquote basketball, UST squeaked by a point, and UE did a massacre. Amazing feats, considering how one Internet denizen put it??Parang walang gustong manalo [No one seemed to want to win].?

The majority of these rookies came from the infamous Nokia RP Youth Team, the very team that, depending on which side of the issue you are, was either abandoned by Franz Pumaren to coach De La Salle in the game against Ateneo, or abandoned by Pumaren but for good reason. Pumaren instituted a rule saying that if you were on the team, you could not play for the school that recruited you, in effect, having them sit out one year.

A lot of fuss was made over these players. Many wondered if it was fair for Pumaren to have what was essentially an exclusive access to new recruits. In light of Saturday?s game, no one is making that argument anymore.

Is it fair to blame the rookies? Perhaps not. Part of the blame should be on the coaches, who deemed it necessary to give these guys crucial minutes on the court without adequate preparation. Blame sloppy recruiting by the coaches, which resulted in a lot of teams losing veteran players, all in the same season, thus giving way to the rookies.

Commentators, scrambling to report something, pinned the blame on opening-day jitters, and this could be true. One can also say it was not just the rookies who played poorly, but the veterans too (Leo Canuday, Paul Lee, come on down!).

Still, there?s something pernicious, and maybe even some Green Archer fans will admit this, about comparing a rookie to a professional basketball player in the NBA. And in a display of basketball that would cause Dr. James Naismith to clank a free throw off the peach basket in horror to boot.

On the bright side, there?s really no way to go but up for this season. At least until Jumamil ?Magic? Tiongson notches five turnovers in his debut, that is.