Basketball and everything in between

When I was doing my research for my post on the influence of college basketball on the NBL I went to each teams website and looked at the player lists and noted some of the obvious ones that I defintely knew (e.g Mark Worthington, Luke Kendall etc) and then went through the rest of the players one by one and checked if their biographies listed college experience.  When I got to the South Dragons list I noticed that there was a player on that list by the name of Daniel Dillon . I had absolutley no clue who this guy was, so I clicked on his biography and I was amazed to find out that he was:

1. A young Australian
2. Attended the University of Arizona for 4 years!

Anybody who knows anything about college basketball knows about the University of Arizona as they toured Australia a lot.  I remeber as a young lad of 14 or 15 sitting at the Auchenflower Basketball Stadium in Brisbane and watching Derek Rucker, Leroy Loggins and Andre Moore take on an Arizona squad featuring Damon Studimore and Khalid Reeves.  In short, Arizona is a powerhouse!

So I did a google search on Daniel Dillon and came up with some interesting stuff.  My google search came up with an article on his arrest for suspected DUI in 2007. I also found out that he was a member of Australian Mens World University Games team in 2005. After going to his profile at yahoo I was very interested to see that during his senior year at Arizona, he averaged 14.4 minutes per game.  So this guy wasn’t just a scrubber who sat on the bench.  He actually played minutes!

So last Wednesday night, I thought that I might have a chance to see this guy play some minutes.  As we are all aware, the Dragons blew the 36ers off the court and he saw some of his first court time for the year.  I have seen some snapshots on ESPN and Fox Sports of the Dragons training.  I saw this young guy running around with ‘Yannick Noah’ hair and it turned out to be Daniel. 

After perusing Daniel Dillon profile again, I noticed that he actually went to North Laurel High School in London, Kentucky in Year 12.  This is an interesting route that not a lot of young Australian’s go down.  Also according to his profile, he was a three time All Australian from under 16’s to under 18’s. The other thing that I noticed on his profile was his tough pose that all of the Dragons players did on their profiles.  He also has good size for a guard and seems to have reasonably quick.

So it will be interesting to see how this guy goes.  He certainly seems to have a good pedigree and will fit into the Brian Gorjian mold of player (e.g get after it defensively).  I wonder how much influence his assistant coach at Arizona Mike Dunlap had over his signing with the Dragons.  Not much I think!