• Heartbreak and Hope
If you’re like me, on draft night you rush to find out as much as you can about an unknown player the San Antonio Spurs drafted with a late second round selection. In the case of the selection of Missouri’s Marcus Denmon recently, I got as much information as I could online in my research before speaking to someone else who knew more on the topic.
I found out all about Denmon’s shooting and being yet another undersized shooting guard, but I never heard much about his personal life, until I read the latest column of a friend of Project Spurs, Ken Rodriguez, recently on Spurs.com.
I saw Rodriguez interviewing Denmon last week before he answered questions from Project Spurs and the rest of the San Antonio media. Rodriguez got a little deeper than Denmon joining the Summer League team, and talked to him about suffering a tragic loss and coming back a day later to play Missouri’s game against Vanderbilt.
Denmon isn’t sure how he played through the pressure. But what happened next tells you something about the inner strength of the Spurs lone 2012 draft pick: He won the game.
On the evening of Dec. 8, 2010, visiting Vanderbilt and 11th-ranked Missouri were knotted at 82. With 8.4 seconds left in overtime, the Commodore’s Brad Tinsley threw a pass to Jeffrey Taylor to set up a final shot. Denmon, a 6-3 guard, swooped in and deflected the pass. He secured the ball, made a contested layup, got fouled and converted the free throw.
Be sure to read the full column on Spurs.com.
• CoryCam
Also from Spurs.com, we’ve seen Cory Joeph’s interview with Denmon recently, but now Joseph takes us on a tour of the Spurs Summer League team bus and talks to a few players, including James Anderson and Ryan Richards.
Joseph asked his Toros teammate Luke Zeller about his brother, Tyler Zeller’s performance, gets the correct pronunciation of Alexis Ajinca’s name and questions JaMychal Green about getting “eight fouls in ten minutes.”
• Spurs vs. Heat
Joseph, Denmon and the rest of the Summer League squad will be back in action tonight against the Miami Heat’s representation in Vegas.
The Heat, who are led in scoring by Norris Cole, are 2-1 just as the Spurs are entering tonight’s game. Aside from Cole, you may recognize a few players on Miami’s team, including ex-Longhorn Dexter Pittman, former Toro Kyle Weaver and Mickell Gladness, who played with the Warriors last season.
Trey Gilder is another name from their roster that has been mentioned on Project Spurs before. Back in September of 2010, the Spurs worked out Trey Gilder and he was expected to be on the training camp roster. On media day, the day before training camp, when I didn’t see Gilder anywhere and saw that Bobby Simmons had joined the Spurs, I knew exactly what had happened. It’ll be good to see how far Gilder has come from then.
The Spurs and Heat tip off at 7 p.m. CST.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
