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1st Quarter (Trimester?) Footage of the Scrimmage

First Exum Sighting

I went to the scrimmage tonight for the sole reason of seeing Dante Exum playing basketball not in the form of highlight videos. Before anyone jumps the gun too much, remember that the Jazz have been doing 2-a-days every day this week, and had worked out this morning also. With that said, Exum is probably no longer my favorite for ROTY.

Exum still showed he has elite speed and size, but he was winded pretty much from the get go tonight. His shot was off, and he seemed to settle a bit instead of attacking the rim.

The bright side was his defense. While he had trouble getting through picks, he looked great at 1 on 1 defense. His size is going to be a problem for other point guards if he stays focused defensively.

Overall Opinion

The first quarter, unfortunately the one I filmed, was pretty bad. The teams were clearly lopsided in my opinion.

White team: Burke, Exum, Hood, Thomas, Gobert vs. Blue team: Clark and 4 guys I don't know

Now go ahead and guess which of these teams was up 9 almost half way through the scrimmage.

First play of the game was a glimpse of the future. Dante Exum breaking down the defense and finding Burke in the corner for an easy 3. The game was sloppy, but showed a few bright spots. Gobert looked bigger, and he held down the middle as usual, but he didn't stand out as much as I was hoping. He was clumsy grabbing the ball, but he did look a little more comfortable when he ended up with the ball outside the paint the few times it happened. Although the White Team was down large early, they rallied back and looked much better in the second two quarters.

MVP

Trey Burke did exactly what a guy with nearly a whole season of starter minutes in the NBA should do against fringe NBA players. He was the most composed player on the court, and was the alpha dog the whole game. On top of that, he pushed the ball in a way he did rarely last season, and he's clearly put in work at attacking the basket.

Ian Clark was the leader of the Blue squad, and the only player that got minutes with the Jazz last year. He showed he can still shoot, and did a great job of giving the Blue squad a surprise early lead.

Brock Motum, PF from Washington State, won the battle of best white stretch 4 against Eric Murphy. Motum came out and scored 8 points off the bench in the first quarter, which was more than half his team's points in the 1st.

But the award for Summer Scrimmage MVP goes to Rodney Hood. Hood's team was down 9 early in the 2nd and couldn't find a bucket. Hood went off for 9 of the next 11 for the White team in the midst of an 11-2 run for the White to tie the game. He scored in a variety of ways too. He hit a spot-up three, had a great crossover to get a jumper, and then dunked in transition. On top of that, he was engaged defensively, and looked like a lot better athlete than I had pegged him for.

Game Footage

Last week I upgraded to a new phone that claims to record amazing video. I decided to try it out tonight for the scrimmage. Here's the first period of tonight's game, which also happens to be my application to the guild of NBA film guys. The picture quality sucks a bit because of YouTube's compression, but you can still make out most of the guys.


Also, there's a video out there of Fesenko throwing down a windmill at the Twolves scrimmage last night. It's a must watch. BIG FES

All comments are the opinion of the commenter and not necessarily that of SLC Dunk or SB Nation.