After a strong showing in Vegas, Blazers rookie Jerryd Bayless plans on challenging Rudy Fernandez for minutes
The Blazers will show patience with Bayless. McMillan said incumbent Steve Blake will be the opening-night starter and Bayless will have to battle for minutes with second-year playmaker Sergio Rodriguez and Rudy Fernandez, a 6-foot-6 combo guard who is coming over from Europe after spending the last seven seasons playing in the elite Spanish ACB League.
Bayless, however, may have something to say about that.
"I think it's [an open competition],"
Bayless said. "Obviously, we're teammates and you have to keep a positive attitude, but when we're out on the court everyone is going to compete."
Mannix also has some good copy on Darius Miles at the bottom of this article.
NBA.com has a Q&A with the Summer League's Top Rookie:
Take me back last to that Phoenix game. It's something special that I'm sure you'll probably remember for the rest of your career - 17 points in the fourth quarter. You guys were down by 14, talk about how you kept pushing and stayed confident.
Jerryd: It's just never quitting. You always got to have that mentality of never quitting. That's just something I've always been brought up with. Whatever the situation is, I'm never going to quit. I'm always going to keep on playing hard and that's what I did last night.
This week you got to go against NBA players, but next week you'll be going against superstars like Kobe, Carmelo and those guys. For you personally, in your career, how is that going to help you progress?
Jerryd: It's a learning experience for me. I'm going to go into there trying to learn and soak up as many things as possible. I'm going to try to learn the tricks that they use, all the different things that they do to get people off balance so they can score and get other people involved. I'm going to try to soak up as much information as possible and try to get better from them.
And if you haven't already checked out Joe Freeman's article today, here's a taste:
After two weeks of summer league practices and games, this much has become evident about the player Portland acquired in a draft-day trade with Indiana: Bayless is a fierce competitor, aggressive athlete and tireless worker. And the 6-foot-3 guard appears fearless.
"That's what we said in our evaluations -- this kid has a chance to be fearless,"
Blazers general manager Kevin Pritchard said. "He's proven that he's willing to get hit five times and get up five times. I think he has a chance to get out there and play and really compete this season."
Playing on a roster loaded with NBA hopefuls, Bayless showed leadership, athleticism and scoring ability that seems tailor-made for the NBA. Even though he competed in a field that featured higher draft picks such as Memphis' O.J. Mayo, Minnesota's Kevin Love and the Los Angeles Clippers' Eric Gordon, Bayless, the 11th overall selection, won summer league MVP honors after averaging 29.8 points, 4.8 rebounds and making 50 of 61 free throw attempts.
Nate McMillan talks with AOL Fanhouse about where he wants Bayless to grow:
MW: What do you think some of those areas are?
NM: Just playing the point guard position. [In the regular season], Brandon Roy will be playing the off-guard. So if he can play the point position and create some opportunities and make some decisions at that position, it really will help his game and help [put him in] a position that he can see some playing time in.
I think the Blazers saw from Bayless mostly what they where hoping to. They wanted to see him score. They wanted to see him take the ball to the rim. They wanted to see if he would fit the fearless scoring role in the second unit. Bayless split much of the point guard minutes in Summer League with Petteri Koponen, but spent the bulk of the time at the off guard position. As much as Portland would have liked to see Bayless display his playmaking ability at the 1 spot, Vegas wasn't the venue for that.
The Blazers will have to wait and see how the if/how Bayless runs a team with the real Blazers, and real big men like LaMarcus Aldridge and Greg Oden on the block. Throwing passes to the post, just to have them bounce off his Summer League teammates' hands and into the crowd wasn't a true display of his point abilities. What Kevin Pritchard, and Nate McMillan and the rest of the staff did see this last week was Bayless' quickness, his ultra-quick crossover, his first-step burst that earned him near unlimited opportunities at the line, his ability to score in traffic and hit the outside shot, scoring in a variety of ways, his confidence, clutch play, defense. All things necessary to be a winner in this year's Summer League.
But after all that, there are still a bevy of questions for Bayless at point. Questions yet to be answered. Questions to be studied and worked on in the coming months and beyond. What we do know is that with Bayless, the Blazers are just that more dangerous of a team, regardless of where he plays. And there's still a lot more to come.
