So if any of you ended up following the summer league you would have seen a very active time. I played in both the Orlando and Utah/Rocky Mountain Review summer leagues which ended up being a very productive time. The Orlando summer league was great mainly because I had the opportunity to play with Kevin Durant and learn from some of what he could do. Also us playing together gave the team a look at us on the floor at the same time. I played well with him and averaged 9 points or there abouts playing about 15 minutes. So overall not a bad run. The greatest thing about this experience was getting the opportunity to play in front of many scouts and GM's letting them see me play against the draft picks and do pretty well. But they are draft picks and they get a lot of slack when it comes to performance. (some of these guys were flat out bad) But keeps me working hard and wanting to kick their asses!!
The second summer league was even more of an opportunity as I played with the D-league Ambassadors. It was basically an all star team from the d-league. We only had 10 guys on the roster which meant we would all be playing a lot of minutes, this was so great because some of the NBA teams were carrying 15-18 guys on the roster. This meant that on average there were 5 guys that had DNP on the stat sheets. (DNP means Did not play) The whole point of summer league is to play. These guys were buried on the bench the whole week and never even sniffed the court. But our team was averaging at least 15 minutes per guy, so everyone had a great chance to show what they could do. Also because we were a d-league team we were written off as an experimental team that would probably not show very well. Were they sadly mistaken. We played harder then any team in the league and showed more team ball ability then any one of the NBA teams. We lost 3 very close games by a total of 10 points. Some of the teams were losing by 15-20 every night and these were the NBA teams. So we proved that the guys in the d-league can easily compete with guys from the league and even out play many of them. But we are the d-league and the logo on our jersey did not give us any respect from the referees. But hey we played very well and proved that the d-league should continue to have a team in the summer leagues.
The second part of the experience was our opportunity to play against the Iranian National Olympic team. I mean this is something to write about. We are practically at war with this country and here they are playing in the United States and asking to play us in their scrimmage games. The ability of athletes to come together from countries, that are ready to blast each other apart politically and militarily, to play a game just shows that sports truly are the greatest ambassador in the world. We came together as competitors who love a sport and love to play that sport and for 2 hours we were just playing a game as hard as we could showing that politics can often get in the way of everything. Twenty guys came together with no hostility at all just wanting to play basketball. Hey President Ahmadinejad chill out man. Hey Pres Bush put the guns down and enjoy a little sport. Maybe WE should lead the negotiations cuz the Iranian team was intelligent and realized that we are all just people and people can come together and enjoy something as simple as basketball and not care about nukes or political bullshit. We had dinner with the Iranian team and over steak and chocolate sundaes we learned more about each other than our politicians have in 20 years. Just follow our lead we will take it from here....We could have the whole thing resolved in an hour.
So chalk another one up for an experience of a life time....this game of basketball just gets better and better. I added a little survey for you all so let me know what you think and I will try and update all that I can.
Love to all!!
