NBA Draft History. Salary Cap. Early Entry Info: Early Entrant. Drafted: Round 1, Pick 6, Cleveland Cavaliers. Pre-Draft Team: Memphis Fr.
More NBA Transactions ». College: Memphis More Dajuan Wagner International Stats ». Menu NBA. When I visited his home in West Deptford, it was dark and empty-looking. If not for the dog barking inside, I would have thought no one lived there. He eventually told me that Wagner was shy, that years of national media coverage and life in the NBA hadn't changed that. By all accounts, he doesn't live extravagantly. There are no statues on his lawn in West Deptford, no indoor basketball court with his initials painted on it.
He does have a net in the driveway. Barclay said he was trying to set something up for me, but I got the feeling that Wagner would avoid an interview if he could. Finally, after weeks of failed attempts and false leads, after numerous pleas with Barclay to help me out, he offered a simple suggestion: "Why don't you just go the game today?
The game, it turned out, was a good one, with Camden and Cherry Hill East trading leads throughout. While he watched, Wagner rarely said a word to the people sitting around him. His son, a spitting image of his father, goofed around with other kids in the bleachers.
At one point, when the ball rolled out of bounds and rested close to Wagner's feet, he cracked a smile and feigned shooting a three-pointer. Then he let another guy throw the ball back in. It reminded me of something his agent, Leon Rose, told me: "He's a very low-key person, but you certainly don't want to mess with him on the court.
If Wagner didn't want to talk, he didn't act like it. He was soft-spoken and polite, shy even. He told me he's on the court almost every day, alone in empty gyms and or playing in pickup games that have become profoundly meaningful to him.
His skills, his dead-on radar for the basket, haven't left, but he did say he needs time to feel right before he thinks about coming back. He needs to be confident that his body can do what it once did without question. I'm getting there. This is the best I've ever felt in a long, long time. People think I'm out there just sitting around, but I'm not. Jon Porter, the strength-and-conditioning specialist at Elite Athletic Performance in Seaville, said Wagner is about 90 percent ready.
He trains like "a football player," Porter says, and straps pound weights around his waist when he does pull-ups. That hasn't changed at all. He can shoot from pretty much anywhere. It's almost surreal to watch. It's his health that has. The whole league would be abuzz," the NBA scout says.
Is he healthy? Those are the million-dollar questions. One of the advantages of not having played all these years, the scout says, is Wagner's body hasn't taken NBA-style abuse for years.
The league is dying for talent," the scout said. He's definitely going to give it another try. Sure, an entire city hitched its hopes to his success. But he was always the best. But you take hope where you can find it in Camden, even if you know better, even if you know those hopes so often tend to wind up languishing in prison cells or lost in corruption. I know exactly when I learned a lesson about false hope in Camden. It was June , and I was covering a story for the Courier-Post about three little boys who had vanished.
I was certain that they were alive and that I'd eventually be writing a feel-good story about the boys bounding back home. Instead, on a sweltering summer day, the father of one of the boys found them in the trunk of a car, all dead. In Camden, it's best to be realistic. A few months after those boys died, the Courier-Post had a story about Wagner making his first NBA comeback after Cleveland declined to sign him for a fourth year.
He felt good. He was making shots. NBA teams were interested. Not long after, he was getting his colon removed. Wagner might have been the closest thing Camden has ever seen to personifying Walt Whitman's dream of a "city invincible," something almost perfect in a city plagued by so many problems.
Now he's an underdog, just like his hometown, and I find myself rooting for him. Not to be a savior, but just to be a basketball player again. Even that is a long shot, for sure, but he's made plenty of them in the past. Tinsley Thesportsfanjournal. The list could extend for days, really. A name never mentioned, however, is DaJuan Wagner. Reasons exist, albeit partially, behind his omission. Just needed 25 shots to be that. One of the guys that Iverson's success led to higher expectations than warranted.
Cal cites him as a case study when people question the one-and-done philosophy. Wagner was a lottery pick after his freshman year then developed Chrohn's disease and was out of the league.
If he stayed at Memphis he would have never made any money. Also his dad played in the NBA too. Probably not a lot of three generation pro sports families. Member since Oct posts. Not as much as Jai Eugene, Jr. Jai signed with LSU in Dajuan Wagner Dajuan Wagner Wagner in Accessed April 6, Sports Illustrated.
Time Inc. Retrieved March 09, August 31, Derrick Rose Ty Lawson O.
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