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But Thursday on senior night, the 6-foot-11, 235-pound Senegal native will play his final home game when the Scarlet Knights face Seton Hall at the Rutgers Athletic Center.

"I really didn't even realize it until last week when I really looked at the schedule and said, hold up, we're playing Seton Hall on my senior day," N'Diaye told reporters this week. "It's nice. I love playing against them. No matter what happens, it's always a very good game, intense, and we give it our best, and that's what's going to happen Thursday."

Seton Hall (16-11, 7-9 Big East) won the first encounter last week between the two Jersey schools, 76-70, in Newark. But Rutgers (15-14, 5-11) will have added motivation to earn revenge on N'Diaye's behalf on senior night.

N'Diaye is averaging 9.7 points, 7.2 rebounds and a Big East-best 4.6 blocks per game. He was invited to compete in the Portsmouth (Va.) Invitational April 7-10 that will feature scouts from every NBA team.

"I still think his best basketball is going to be five years down the road and I think we're going to see him in the NBA one day," Rutgers head coach Fred Hill said last season.

From Sengal to the United States: Had it not been for Babacar Sy, N'Diaye might never have left his home in Dakar, Senegal.

A native of Senegal, Sy opened the Babacar Sy Basketball School in Dakar in 2000. He later became the head coach of the Senegalese under-18 national team, and the assistant coach of the under-20 team.

When Sy first spotted N'Diaye, he knew the tall young man had potential and so he approached him.

"Do you want to learn the game of basketball?" Sy asked N'Diaye.

"Why learn basketball when I have school?" N'Diaye said.

The youngest of six siblings, he played soccer and volleyball at the time, but he had been raised by his parents to value education over athletics.

"I can show you things, and you might have the opportunity to make it to the United States and have a better education," Sy told him.

Soon Sy was teaching N'Diaye the fundamentals of the game. By 2004, N'Diaye participated in the Basketball Without Borders Camp in Johannesburg, South Africa. The event, sponsored by the NBA, featured 100 of the top prospects from Africa and included instructors and guest speakers Dikembe Mutombo, Samuel Dalembert and Alex English.

It wasn't long, N'Diaye said, before he got a call from a Baylor University assistant coach offering him the promise of a better life.

"They called me on the phone," N'Diaye recalled last year. "I wasn't speaking good English, so I wouldn't be able to repeat to you what exactly they said. The only words I understood were 'scholarship' and 'America.'

"I said, 'Hey, why not?'" N'Diaye recalled.

And with that, N'Diaye left his family in 2004 and journeyed to the U.S. with almost no knowledge of English. His first stop was Life Center Academy in Burlington, N.J.

But he didn't stay long.

After Sy, then an assistant coach at the College of Southern Idaho, was hired to coach at Florida Prep in March 2005, N'Diaye followed his mentor.

But the experience at Florida Prep did not work out for N'Diaye and the other Africans on the team.

N'Diaye and eight of his teammates packed up their things and left Florida in a rush in the middle of the night.

"It was a big drama going on in Florida so the whole team went to Stoneridge in California where it was my senior year of high school," N'Diaye said.

Warrior at Rutgers: N'Diaye ended up at Rutgers, where he has evolved into one of the most dominant defensive big men in the league even as his offensive game is still a work in progress.

On Thursday he will go up at times against fellow senior John Garcia, a fifth-year player for the Pirates.

"It kind of makes you step up your level of play, knowing he's going to bring it every night," Garcia told reporters about N'Diaye after Seton Hall lost to Marquette on Sunday. "He's a warrior. He stuck through all the ups and down they had at Rutgers and he's been strong. Other guys, they jumped ship. He's been that one solid rock for them, that solid foundation for them these last four years. I have a lot of respect for him for that one simple fact."

Rutgers sophomore guard Mike Rosario needs just six points to join Phil Sellers as the only Rutgers sophomores to score 1,000 points. Yet Rosario is more concerned about getting N'Diaye a win.

"He means a lot to this program," Rosario said. "That's going to mean a lot to me Thursday, to get a win for him. We're going to go out there and leave it all on the floor for 'H' from the start to the end. He's sacrificed so much for us and our team, it's unbelievable. We want to reward him. That's the only thing I want to see is a smile on his face after the game."

As for N'Diaye's future, Jonathan Givony of DraftExpress.com believes there could be a spot for N'Diaye on an NBA roster.

"I think he's had a good year," Givony said. "He's obviously got NBA size and length and people are going to like his shot-blocking ability and his defense. He plays really hard. He seems to be a good guy so that's all going to work in his favor.

"The question is offensively. Is he a guy that's going to be able to hold his own and give you something offensively? I don't think he has a ton of NBA buzz, but every NBA team is going to be at Portsmouth. If he plays hard and runs the floor and blocks shots, maybe there's a guy who says, 'I could use a guy like this as my third big off the bench.' You can't rule out a guy like that with his size."