Scoring Off the Board : Basketball: Matijasevic ditches skateboard to become a Crescenta Valley force.

Silly Paul Matijasevic. For a moment, he expected a modicum of praise from Crescenta Valley High Coach John Goffredo for his performance in a recent victory over Burbank. Instead, awaiting Matijasevic in the locker room was a mortar blast of criticism.

Inconsistency was the problem. At times, Matijasevic would hustle. At other times, he would loaf. Some players run with the speed of a deer; Matijasevic posted up with the timidity of one.

A quick check of the scorebook silenced Goffredo. Matijasevic had scored 20 points and grabbed 19 rebounds.

“I have some pretty high expectations,” Goffredo said. “Most coaches would have patted him on the back and said, ‘You’re wonderful.’ I was on his butt.”

For good reason. Goffredo has held a flame to the 6-foot-7 senior before, and the results have been remarkable. Matijasevic’s turnaround in the past three years has been more impressive than a 360-degree dunk. He changed from an aimless skateboard fanatic to one of the top high school frontcourt players in the Valley area. The transformation took place on the basketball court but the effects were felt in the classroom and in his personal life, as well.

Basketball was not an immediate elixir. The discipline of practices frustrated Matijasevic during his first two seasons. He often considered quitting the team. Life was simple on a skateboard. There were no rules on the sidewalk.

“I think it was quite a challenge because Paul wasn’t quite ready to knuckle down with it,” Paul’s mother, Elizabeth, said. “I don’t think he knew how much he would have to give of himself to basketball.”

Dividends began to trickle in when he made the varsity last season. The local press took notice of his play. He got attention on campus.

“I saw a big difference,” Elizabeth said. “He thought, ‘Maybe it’s worth all the time and effort I put into it.’ Then, the skateboard was thrown aside.”

He often would go to school at 6 a.m. on school days to shoot on his own. He spent his spare time scouting games with Goffredo.

“I don’t know how I turned it around,” Matijasevic said. “Coach just started helping me.”

And Matijasevic, who was gangly and awkward as a freshman, has flourished. He now averages 15 points and 10 rebounds a game, and he scored 28 points against Montebello. He was chosen the most valuable player of the Saugus tournament and named to the All-Crescenta Valley tournament team. In a showdown last month with North Hollywood’s Dana Jones, Matijasevic outscored the Pepperdine-bound center, 16-11.

“He’s great near the basket,” Glendale Coach Bob Davidson said of Matijasevic. “A very good inside player. He’s got a real good touch in there and he jumps real well too.”

Matijasevic, once resistant to authority, has come to terms with occasional lambastings from Goffredo.

“When you’re doing something wrong, he gets on you a lot and that sort of makes me mad,” Matijasevic said. “But that’s just him.

“I feel like I’ve got my act together.”

Had it not come together, Matijasevic might have been sprawled across some La Crescenta street. Although he has forsaken his skateboard, he used to ride for hours every day. His favorite game was to lie on his board in a position aptly dubbed “the coffin” and plummet feet first down the steepest, most toe-tingling hill he could find. It was a sort of urban luge run. Friends drove alongside the then-6-foot-5 missile and, Matijasevic says, clocked him at more than 40 mph.

And then there was the one-armed handstand.

“The shorter kids could do it with ease,” Matijasevic said.

He couldn’t. As proof, a nasty, cigar-sized scar runs along the inside of his left elbow. While skateboarding during his freshman year, he attempted the move and fractured his arm in three places. He still has trouble fully extending the arm.

The risky antics terrified his mother. “We tried everything with the skateboard,” she said. “Confiscate it. Nothing worked. He and his skateboard always seemed to get together.”

Meanwhile, he and academia drifted briskly apart. Matijasevic’s grades plunged more quickly than he did in “the coffin.” His record of classroom offenses grew as long as his shaggy blond hair. He had a 1.1 grade-point average after his freshman year. It has since improved to 2.9.

“I would come to school and teachers would say that Paul’s done this or that--disrupting the class,” Elizabeth said. “He was very mischievous. I wouldn’t say he was a bad kid.”

Not a bad kid, but an apathetic one.

“He was just disinterested in school,” Crescenta Valley Principal Ken Biermann said. “Or just simply, if I have to (go to school), I have to.”

Enter Goffredo, who lives little more than a long jump shot from the Matijasevics. He had seen the lanky youngster skateboarding around the neighborhood. As a 6-foot-4 eighth-grader, Matijasevic was tough to miss. He was also a regular at the local video arcade owned by Norm Jones, the Falcons’ freshman basketball coach.

Goffredo approached him once but Matijasevic said that he would be attending St. Francis High and did not plan to play basketball. His grades were too low for St. Francis, however, and he wound up at Crescenta Valley.

The metamorphosis on the court has not been complete.

“He loses focus,” Goffredo said. “He’ll put out and then he’ll drift.

“He’s an emotional player and he has to stay emotional. If he’s not, then he’s not effective. You have to be intense. Nobody cares how tall you are.”

Matijasevic plans to attend a junior college and would like to play eventually for Loyola Marymount. According to Goffredo, he would face long odds in making a Division I roster.

About as long as the odds that basketball could change Matijasevic.