Justin Graham makes his mark

Justin Graham is back in the Bay Area and he recently joined the Bay Pride (BP) squad in the San Francisco Pro-Am League. BP lost a playoff game Tuesday night but with Graham receiving great praise:

...Bay Pride had already relied on their guard play well before Justin Graham joined the team, as early in the season Quincy Smith routinely blew by his man often finishing with an emphatic dunk at the rim and Jourdan DeMunyck had been the league’s most consistent scorer all summer long. But the team struggled to find wins, even as DeMunyck and Smith had great individual nights. As good as the two guards were, turnovers and an unstable defense saw the team slip almost completely out of playoff contention altogether. That is until a few weeks back, when Graham showed up and the holes in the team that had once been their downfall were filled.

Graham is a player who fills the role of two players. He’s a talented individual player who is also able to do all the little things a team would hope to get from a role player.  Along with Wendell Mckines, he’s was probably the league’s best two-way player this summer.  In the team’s monumental win over Dream Team he did a phenomenal job on Isaiah Thomas. The NBA star rarely got a clean look at the basket and was visibly frustrated with how hard he had to work to get his points. As tough as Graham made the night for Thomas, he made it equally as easy for DeMunyck. Who was free to take helpless defenders off the dribble, with Graham occupying would be double-teamers. He could finally assert his elite ability to move without the ball, while Graham found him with crisp passes while he made his well-timed cuts. With Graham drawing defenses and kicking out he could spot up for open threes. Smith reaped the benefits of the versatile guard as well, with both DeMuynck and Graham occupying the majority of the defense’s attention he was free to use his quickness to get in the lane and ended up with an array of acrobatic finishes.When the final buzzer sounded to end the second overtime Smith had scored a large amount of the team’s biggest buckets on timely drives. DeMunyck had his best game of the summer, finishing the night with 57 points. Graham had made life a whole lot easier for his talented backcourt mates and in the process transformed the team from an entertaining bottom dweller to a serious contender...