Interbasket

Welcome to Interbasket’s first SLAM Report. Every month, your lovely editor receives an issue in the mail and his intention is to always report on articles or mini-articles that feature international players. Your lovely editor has actually been meaning to do this for three years, that’s actually how lazy your lovely editor is.

This month’s feature covers an Interbasket favorite, Jose Manual Calderon with a really unfortunate title.

In Your Face: Bubbling Calderon
He’s a fan favorite in Toronto, a point guard so pure he feels the need to set up teammates with Gatorade in the locker room at halftime. Earlier this season, he kept the Raptors fans’ fingers off the panic button after TJ Ford went down with another horrific neck injury by flawlessly running the Raps’ offense without a legitimate backup. And to think, two years ago, Jose Calderon wondered if he belonged in the NBA.

“The first year was terrible,” the 6-3 Spaniard says, recalling his rookie season. “We lost a lot of games, I was injured with plantar fasciitis, I didn’t play a lot of minutes. I even thought about coming back home because I didn’t know [what] my role in the team was.”

After spending the summer in ‘06 in Spain running point on their World Championship national team, Calderon returned to Toronto a different player. He started to show a knack for decision-making, improved his outside shot and found his niche on the team, playing the distributive ying to Tj Ford’s shoot-first Yang.

Calderon’s third season has seen him blossom even more, His scoring (12.4ppg) and assists (8.7 per game) are career bests, and he’s become the League’s model of efficiency with a ridiculous 5.56-to-1-assist-to-turnover ratio. His play has drawn comparisons to Canada’s other favorite point guard, Steve Nash.

“Calderon is genuine, happ, competitive, and loves to play the game. He loves the environment of being around people ad I think those are the same traits that Steve had, to a T,” says Raptor’s assistant coach Jay Triano, who as Canada’s former national team coach saw Nash’s game take off after the Sydney Olympics in 2000. “Both players get as much satisfaction out of making a pass as they do scoring a point. They’re both very, very adept at handling the basketball and it makes it tough for them to be guarded.”

As a restricted free-agent after this season. Calderon and the Raptors know he’ll have a number of teams vying for his services. For now, though, Jose is getting on the Raptors back into the playoffs and burying that painful rookie year underneath everything else. “Last year was a really good year for me and this year, too,” he says. The first, it’s better to forget about it.”

Source: Slam Magazine, issue 117 (May 2008)