Snubbing their noses at the experts
The draft is essentially when pro sports are reduced to gym class, everyone dying to be picked first for a team and dreading being left out when all the picks have been made.
The Celtics’ Glen Davis still knows all the names of players picked before him in the draft. He especially knows the ones who are dangling in the wind now.
Javaris Crittenton. Boston College’s Sean Williams. The Finnish kid, Petteri Koponen, whom Philadelphia took a flier on. They all were supposed to have more upside than Davis. They all were supposed to be better fits. They’re all gone.
Davis was called everything from undersized and out of shape to slow and heavy, and even though a 1,000-watt NCAA Tournament, in which he led Louisiana State to the Final Four, put him on the radar in 2006, his stock dropped when he declared the next year. He fell to the second round, the guaranteed money and years that first-rounders get eluding him.
“It molds you into the player that you need to be,’’
Davis said. “You can take that information and you can take that experience and go whatever way you want to. You can feel sorry for what you didn’t do in college. You can ask, ‘Why didn’t people draft you?’
Or you can take the information and say this is going to be my fuel to get to where I need to go and show these people that when you passed me up, you made a huge mistake.’’
The Celtics locker room is full of players who know what it’s like to be skipped over only to laugh last.
Paul Pierce still doesn’t understand how he fell to the 10th overall pick in the 1998 draft. Marquis Daniels was skipped over by the entire league in 2003. The Suns took Nate Robinson with the 21st pick in 2005, then dealt him to New York. They had the same pick the next year and did the same thing with Rajon Rondo, shipping him to Boston. Even Celtics president Danny Ainge and coach Doc Rivers were second-round picks.
“You earn everything you get in the NBA,’’
Davis said. “Some guys are given that first-round pick, that starting position. You’ve got to go take it.’’
That sense of being snubbed doesn’t last long, Rivers said, but it is there.
“I think you always remember where you were drafted and you remember a bunch of guys you thought you were better than went in front of you,’’
Rivers said. “But the only way you prove that is with your play.’’
His first year at Marquette, Rivers set the school’s freshman records for points, scoring average, field goals made, field goal percentage, and steals. Two years later, he left for the NBA. Five point guards were taken in the first round of the 1983 draft. One more, Sidney Lowe, now the coach at North Carolina State, was taken before the Hawks grabbed Rivers with the 31st pick.
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