Reply With Quote
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/...-draft-charge/
Carroll making his draft charge
Former Tiger now could go in first.
By Steve Walentik
Sunday, June 7, 2009
DeMarre Carroll has crisscrossed the country since leaving Columbia in late April, traveling to Portland and Miami with at least a half-dozen stops in between.
He’s played in front of NBA officials such as Miami Heat President Pat Riley and Indiana Pacers Coach Jim O’Brien and worked out alongside current pros such as Danny Granger, Nick Young and Jared Dudley and other college standouts such as Boston College’s Tyrese Rice and Southern California’s Taj Gibson.
With each stop he makes, it seems increasingly likely that Carroll will also turn up in New York City — at least in name — on June 25, when the NBA holds its draft at Madison Square Garden. Regarded as a borderline second-round prospect at the end of his first-team All-Big 12 senior season at Missouri, Carroll has received strong reviews for his play in individual workouts over the past six weeks to dramatically enhance his draft stock.
“Everybody tells me I’m a lock for the second round, but now people say they’re going to pick me up in the first round,” Carroll said. “I’ve got GMs saying that a winning team needs a guy like me to come off the bench. I feel like I can sneak in the first round.
“I know my agent’s got me working out for a lot of teams that’s 20 through 30 to the 20 through 40-range. We don’t expect nothing less than that.”
Basketball coaches, executives and scouts are predisposed to like the all-out effort and intensity that defined Carroll’s career at Missouri, where he averaged 16.6 points and 7.2 rebounds as a senior while leading the Tigers to a 31-7 record and a surprising run to the Elite Eight.
But Carroll has surprised talent evaluators with how much athletic ability and skill he’s also demonstrated during his workouts.
When he left Columbia, he moved to Los Angeles and has been training with former NBA player Don MacLean, who set the Pac-10 Conference all-time scoring record during his four-year career at UCLA. MacLean has helped Carroll improve his ball-handling and expand the range on his jump shot to make him a more versatile player in the eyes of NBA scouts. He said he’s lowered the release point on his jumper and has been making NBA 3-pointers as consistently as he hits midrange shots.
Though he was listed at 6-foot-8 during his time in Columbia, many believed that Carroll was actually closer to 6-6 and, therefore, too short to play under the basket in the NBA. He measured at 6-7¾ in shoes at the NBA Draft Combine last week in Chicago to alleviate some concerns about his size, but MacLean is still trying to help him transition to small forward after playing almost exclusively at power forward during his college career.
“He’d rather me be a 3 and play a little 4 than be a 4 and play the 3,” Carroll said.
He’s shown enough agility in his workouts to convince some teams he’s ready to guard NBA wing players.
In an interview earlier this week with the Web site HOOPSWORLD, Ryan Blake, the assistant director of scouting for Marty Blake & Associates, identified Carroll one of the sleepers in this year’s draft class.
“You’ve got DeMarre Carroll, who is a swing that can play two positions and guard two positions,” Blake said. “That’s a very valuable guy. … He’s going to get gobbled up. If he doesn’t make a team, I’ll be very surprised.”
Blake compared Carroll to Renaldo Balkman, the former South Carolina standout who was a first-round draft choice of the New York Knicks in 2006 and came off the bench for the Denver Nuggets this season.
“Carroll is just so active, and he’s bigger and more athletic than you think,” one NBA executive told ESPN.com’s Chad Ford in a story published on May 28. “I’m not sure he’s a star in the league, but I do think he’s going somewhere in the first round. A contending team needs guys like him. He’ll do anything and do it with a smile on his face.”
Carroll’s task the next three weeks is to continue what he’s been doing to solidify or even improve his draft position. Mending from a sprained ankle that kept him from working out for Minnesota earlier this week, Carroll is scheduled to work out for Sacramento, Utah, San Antonio, Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit and Charlotte in the lead-up to the draft.
“I just feel like there’s three weeks left,” Carroll said, “and hopefully I can make a real push and know by the week going into the draft if I’ll be a first rounder or not.”
