Joakim Noah was an accomplished basketball player at Poly Prep Country Day School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He did many things well. He rebounded. He scored. He led the Blue Devils to two league titles.

One surprising area where he struggled? Opening tips. Bill McNally, the coach at Poly Prep, had a system in which Noah was supposed to use a subtle signal to indicate where he intended to direct the ball. The problem was that Noah was too expressive. He would turn scratching the side of his head (one such signal) into an artistic performance. Everyone in the gymnasium knew where the ball was going. McNally would bury his head in his hands.

“It didn’t matter what he was doing,” McNally said in an interview at the school last week. “Everything with him was all out, all the time.”

Before Noah joined the Chicago Bulls, becoming the N.B.A.’s defensive player of the year and one of the league’s most infectious personalities, he spent two formative years at Poly Prep. He was prone to hugging his teammates and singing to himself and clapping his hands in a manner that opponents considered overly enthusiastic. In other words, little has changed.