There’s a lot of basketball skill in this week’s #FanTeaser.
Saint Mary’s (CA) College and Davidson College haven’t produced too many NBA champions through the years, but back in the 2009 NIT, two future long-time members of the Association who’ve combined to win a total of five Larry O’Brien NBA Championship Trophies, met for the first time.
Those two players:
- Saint Mary’s guard Patty Mills
- Davidson guard Stephen Curry
Mills, a native of Canberra, Australia, was a standout lead guard for the Gaels in what was his second and final season on the Moraga, CA, campus. He averaged 18.4 points and 3.7 assists per game for Saint Mary’s, which burst out to an 18-1 record and a national ranking of No. 22, before the Aussie broke his shooting hand and missed a half-dozen games.
Curry, who finished that season as the nation’s leading scorer (28.6 points per game), had burst on the scene a year earlier when he led the Wildcats to the NCAA Tournament’s Elite 8, beating seventh-seeded Gonzaga (92-76), second-seeded Georgetown (74-70), and third-seeded Wisconsin (73-56), before falling to top-seeded and eventual NCAA Champion, Kansas (59-57).
The matchup in Moraga was a pre-cursor to 16 years worth of NBA battles between the two. Curry’s been a Golden State Warrior all 17 seasons while Mills spent all but three of his 16 NBA seasons in the Western Conference.
It was such a huge game that special t-shirts were produced to commemorate the event, which sold out in under 30 minutes. Saint Mary’s wound up winning the game, 80-68, with Mills leading the way. He scored 23 points and handed out 10 assists. Curry, meanwhile, was held to 26 points, nine rebounds, and five assists.
The two went on to more acclaim as NBA players.
As noted previously, Curry’s spent all 17 of his NBA seasons in, ironically enough, the Bay Area playing for Golden State, where he’s won four NBA titles, a pair of league MVP awards, and has stretched the limits of what’s considered an “in range shot” for most.
For his part, Mills won a NBA title during the 2013-14 season for the San Antonio Spurs, where he was an extension of Coach Gregg Popovich off the bench as starting point guard Tony Parker‘s primary backup.
- For more reading on the Curry-Mills matchup from 2009, check out this San Jose Mercury News article at this link.
Just to review, The Fan Teaser was the creation of former Ann Arbor News Sports Editor Geoff Larcom. Longtime friend and fellow Ann Arbor News alum, Pat Schutte, took it to heights previously unknown. We aim to keep it alive here at The Sports Fan Project. The cropped photo and the accompanying clue give you an idea as to who or what the image is of. We invite you to use the Comment option to take a crack at solving the Teaser and, if you’re so inclined, participate in some good-spirited banter with your fellow sports fans. The Fan Teaser will appear each Friday morning with the reveal coming to you Sunday.