01-25-2008, 06:11 AM
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#1 (permalink)
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Moderator
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Wisconsin
Posts: 5,492
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JSOnline: Diener gets professional treatment he deserves
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The Bradley Center occasionally can be a place of relative solitude when the Milwaukee Bucks occupy the building. This wasn't exactly a Hannah Montana crowd settling into its seats Thursday night when the last starter for the Indiana Pacers was introduced.
Suddenly, what passed for genuine enthusiasm resounded. The blue and gold on No. 12 might have looked familiar to some, but the initiated, they knew. The first family of state basketball, along with all the friends and admirers, were making something approaching righteous noise.
Travis Diener was about to make his first NBA start.
Now, Diener has been back before to the place he called home for four distinguished collegiate seasons, not that many outside the sisters and the cousins and the uncles and all of the players and coaches that make up the Diener clan noticed.
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Quote:
It was a matter of finding the right team, the right system and the right coach. Diener hit the trifecta seven months ago when he signed a three-year, $4.9 million contract with the Pacers.
"They were one of the first teams in the free-agent process to contact me and show interest," Diener said. "It got me closer to home. I've got friends who can come down often and see me play. I would definitely take less money to play closer to home so I could have that. It made the decision easy with the way Coach O'Brien plays. Everything I looked at was a positive."
Jim O'Brien likes to push the ball, shoot a lot of threes and give the point guard freedom to make decisions, qualities that fit Diener's game. Working through a sore foot and ankle, Diener scored a career-high 19 points this month at Sacramento.
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http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=711101
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JSOnline: Diener gets professional treatment he deserves
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