DETROIT — With a new NBA season still a few days away, the Detroit Pistons' Tayshaun Prince lay on an exam table, gasping for air. His heart was pounding and a bunch of wires quivered between his chest and a nearby machine. The image of his beating heart gurgled on another.

He was on the final leg of his preseason physical - a cardiac stress test. The treadmill exercise was, in his labored words, tough.

"It's harder because it's uphill," he said.

After a string of sudden heart problems in professional sports a few years ago, the NBA became the first professional league to mandate heart stress tests and echocardiograms for its players. These are the same tests doctors would recommend for anyone at risk for coronary heart disease, heart attack or stroke.

For Joe Six-Pack, said Barry Franklin, who runs the stress test lab at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, the test is pretty straightforward. Resting blood pressure and other measurements are taken. Then the patient, wired to an electrocardiogram, or EKG, machine that gathers data periodically, climbs on the treadmill. The treadmill is set to a slow, flat walk, which gradually becomes either a fast walk or a run, with a steep incline.

As its name implies, the test stresses the heart, and after the patient "cries uncle," said Franklin, there's a short cooldown, and stats are gathered as the patient recovers.

The peaks and valleys of the EKG can clue Franklin in to clogged arteries or irregular heartbeats. Some of the information he gets, he said, "is probably one of the single best indexes of survival."

Prince's test was slightly different, said Dr. Luis Afonso, the lead cardiologist from Detroit Medical Center for the Pistons' physicals. Because he's in such good shape, the test moves a little quicker from the easy stages to the hard. And his recovery time is much faster. Within the first few seconds after coming off the treadmill, his pulse dropped 30 beats per minute. An average person, Afonso said, drops about half that amount in that time.

The addition of the echocardiogram shows how strong the heart walls are as it pumps blood through the body. It's an ultrasound test, and the cool ultrasound gel was a welcome relief to some of the players.

Adding heart tests to team physicals at the collegiate and high school levels has been hotly debated for years.

EKGs and echocardiograms are expensive, said Dr. Jeff Kovan, team physician for the 800 athletes at Michigan State University. The NCAA doesn't require the tests, and there's not a lot of supporting data to say it's necessary to do so, he said.

Suspicious findings are rare and riddled with false positives, Kovan said. But a sudden death can dwarf economic considerations.

"What the NBA is doing for that level of athlete, with the resources they have, is the right thing, but the resources are continuously going to be an issue for college, high school and youth sports. There's going to be a point in time where the public pressure will be too great" and schools will do the tests even if they can't afford them, he said.

The WNBA does different cardiac tests, said NBA spokesman Tim Franklin.

And while the NBA wouldn't release any findings of heart trouble in players, he said in an e-mail, "Yes, we will absolutely continue with this testing annually."

The Pistons staff agrees, and some took the opportunity to get their hearts checked out as well.

"You're thankful we didn't get hit over the head with a problem," said head athletic trainer Mike Abdenour. "Let's say, God forbid, a guy gets down there and there is a problem. At least you know."