The Jump: Durant also surpassing Carmelo from the charity stripe in @usabasketball men’s Olympic basketball history: 1. Kevin Durant (54) – and counting. 2. Carmelo Anthony (53). 3. David Robinson (50). #TheJump
David Robinson Rumors
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David Robinson
Position: -
Born: 08/06/65
Height: 7-1 / 2.16
Weight:250 lbs. / 113.4 kg.
Earnings: $114,448,123 ($183,790,045*)
Born: 08/06/65
Height: 7-1 / 2.16
Weight:250 lbs. / 113.4 kg.
Earnings: $114,448,123 ($183,790,045*)
“It’s not always the kid,” Xavier coach Travis Steele said. “You’ll get a mentor or a parent in there saying, ‘Our Jimmy Joe is 6-foot-5!’ And you’re like, no, he’s 6-foot-3.’ We’ll get hit by parents who are sure their kid is taller than that. And it’s like, no, he’s really not.” There are other gambits, too. “You get kids who are 17 and they’re 6-foot-3, and they say, ‘Oh, (the doctor says) I’m going to be 6-foot-6,’” Maryland coach Mark Turgeon said. “You know, ‘My growth plates are wide open.’ When I first got into coaching 30 years ago, I believed those kids. None of them — OK, very rarely — do you get a David Robinson. It just doesn’t happen.”
In October 1997, the San Antonio Spurs convened for training camp. At the end of their first practice, head coach Gregg Popovich split his players into two teams for a scrimmage. One group was anchored by David Robinson, the Spurs’ All-Star center who had missed most of the previous season due to injuries. The other was led by Tim Duncan, a rookie whom the Spurs had drafted no. 1 overall that June. This would be the first time Duncan and Robinson would face off. It would also be one of the last.
“We really couldn’t believe what we were seeing,” Avery Johnson, the Spurs’ starting point guard at the time, said in a phone interview. “Tim dominated David, who I thought was a pretty good defender.” Johnson chuckled. “It got to the point where Pop had David spend the rest of training camp on Tim’s team.”
Duncan had been named the National College Player of the Year while at Wake Forest the previous season. Scouts considered him a premier prospect, and, since he’d played four years of college ball, believed he was NBA-ready. Still, no one expected him to be as polished as he was. He seemed to be everywhere on defense. He seemed to grab every rebound. He seemed to never miss. But it wasn’t just that the 21-year-old Duncan was dominating, and doing so against a recent league MVP. It’s that, to quote Johnson, “he was doing so with bank shots.”
