February 12th, 2016 - Detroit, Michigan
We all met pretty late today. I'd organised for a fully catered staff lunch before our lovely conference room became a fully fledged war time bunker. Yes we had a war room for the draft but I didn't want this to be that serious. Not that it was about to be a vacation either, we were here to work. Over breakfast we had decided to split the work load over the three days of the events in Toronto.
Today, day one would be actually be pretty informal just sharing ideas and thoughts on the season so far but only because the highlight was the Rising Stars game on later today. Day 2 we'd be analyzing The League, player stats, team stats, upcoming free agents, contract and trade rumors. That kind of thing. Day 3 was going to be all about us. An indepth analysis of the roster, the players stats and ours as a team of course. Then using that we could begin to plan what our goal was for the second half of the season, because at this point I firmly believe we are stuck in limbo, too good for a game changing lottery pick but not good enough for a deep playoff run. But i'll expand on that later.
First things first we had Valentines ASW debut to watch. I probably shouldn't admit to this but we had a little betting pool going on around the table. For us it was friendly competition not only over our own rookie but also the others around the league. Why not, a little bonding and team building never hurt anyone. The consensus was that the game would suit Valentine well, we needed it too quite frankly. We were hoping a little relaxed exhibition atmosphere among his peers would settle him down before coming back here to Detroit.
February 12th, 2016 - Toronto, Ontario
This was everything I dreamed it would be. I'm sat here, in the Toronto Raptors locker room suiting up for the Rising Stars game. If I'm being honest there's no way I expected to be here this weekend, I had just hoped I'd be able to adjust my game to The League and help out the team that had drafted me. Playing in Europe was nothing like this, I don't think anything could have prepared me for The League, the team has been playing pretty well from what I can gather. We're doing better than the pre season expectation so that's something.
Everyone is telling me that I'm doing well but I tend to disagree. While I might be scoring, the misses are still killing me. Maybe I'm putting too much thought into it because it isn't all bad, I think that defensively, I'm more than carrying my weight. If you take it back to the beginning that's all I ever wanted to be. The shooting just happened and that seemed to be what teams saw me as instead of where my true strengths lay.
Getting back to this weekend though we arrived yesterday afternoon and got a chance to meet up and hangout with everyone at a players dinner. Shawn text me to say he was coming up with Ernest and Ty as well but we hadn't had the chance to catch up yet. We had a little practice session/shootaround this morning which was actually really great. I'm on a team with Aaiden Blackshear, he's a h*ll of a guy. There seems to be a stigma around The League that follows him about how he's this bad*ss, no nonense type but it's actually not true at all. On the court he's like that but off of it he's just a kid living his dream like the rest of us.
See, the funny thing with Aaiden and I is that everyone expects us to be enemies or rivals, whatever you want to call it because there's supposed to be some monumental battle between us for the ROTY award. We made some jokes about it sure but the pair of us got on real well. The fact is that this is a guy expected to take over The League before too long all because of his family name. Sure his brother Avon was drafted too but going #1 and being a Blackshear the onus was on Aaiden to take over from his uncle Whakil as he had done when Devon's career started to slow down. Devon being Whakil's older brother, and Uncle to Avon and Aaiden.
Despite the friendly competition it was Rashard Wallace, the PG from USC I got on best with. Rashard had been in the Top 3 conversation along with Aaiden and I all of last year but ultimately ended up slipping to the Jazz at #6. Unfortunately for us, 'Shard was playing for the Stars tonight so we could only hope that at some point we'd be guarding each other.