Simply Juanderful

When the Washington Bullets selected Maryland’s Juan Dixon with the 17th pick in the 2002 NBA Draft, most thought it was a selection based more on marketing than basketball.
Dixon, after all, had just led the local university to their first national championship, captivating the Nation’s Capital in the process. Once Michael Jordan stopped playing (which he would at the end of the next season), the Bullets would need someone to market the team around. Since the team hadn’t had a breakout star since Gheorghe Muresan in My Giant, selecting the local feel-good story made more sense than taking a flier on Qyntel Woods.
Most expected Juan Dixon to sit at the end of the bench, get a standing ovation when he’d come in the game during garbage time and essentially live off the fame he accrued during that magical March back in 2002.
But, somewhere in between the marketing campaign centered around the rookie Dixon, the firing of Michael Jordan and the resurgence of a team that hadn’t won a playoff game since 1988, Juan Dixon turned into a key bench player for the Bullets.
Last year he averaged a shade under ten points a game while playing just 20 minutes per and while his numbers slipped a bit across the board in 2005, he was still a solid contributor to a team that won the most games in the franchise’s last 25 years.
Coming off the bench late in the 1st quarter is a big change from being the go-to guy on the best college team in the country, but Juan adjusted well. Even so, he still didn’t have a defining moment in the NBA yet – something to silence all his critics, even if for a moment.
The most publicity Juan had received since graduating from Maryland was that he was left unprotected by the Bullets in the 2004 expansion draft, but then went unselected by the Charlotte Bobcats.
It was like he was 18 years old all over again; Juan Dixon couldn’t get any respect.
It’s hard not to see the parallels between Juan Dixon the NBA player and Juan Dixon the skinny shooter from the Baltimore projects who had the drug-abusing, AIDS-infected parents and drew little interest from any big-time schools.
The younger Juan was thought to be too skinny, too undersized to bang with the big boys in the ACC or Big East. He was too small to play the two and too slow to play point. Both of those criticisms were re-circulated when the Bullets took Dixon at #17. That his family situation was so chaotic (Juan’s father died of AIDS when he was 15, his mother passed just two years later) was yet another mark against Dixon while being recruited.
But what all the college coaches (except Gary Williams) failed to realize was that those two perceived knocks on Dixon were exactly the reason they should have recruited him.
By being smaller than most of the guys on the Baltimore playgrounds, Juan learned to play bigger, forgetting about slashing to the hoop like an Allen Iverson and instead developing the jump shot that would become his calling card.
And the tragedy of Juan’s personal life only gave him the resolve to get out of the ghetto and not succumb to the easy allure of heroin and crack like his parents. Along with his older brother Phil (a Baltimore police officer), Juan vowed not to end up like his parents who were “addicted to the streets”, as he once put it.
When his parents were getting their smack-fix or spending the night in jail or even dying of AIDS, Juan went to the basketball court to get away from his troubles.
Basketball was an escape for Dixon... and a way out.
So when Juan approached Eddie Jordan in the MCI Center parking garage Saturday evening after a dismal Game 3 performance and begged the coach not to give up on him, Jordan promised he wouldn't. Juan Dixon knows what real problems are and a shooting slump is not one of them.
The next day Juan arrived to the MCI Center hours before any of his teammates and shot hundreds of jump shots, just like he used to do at Cole Field House late at night with his girlfriend retrieving the balls.
Juan returned to F Street early yesterday, shooting for a full two hours before any of his Bullets teammates arrived (or, in Kwame Brown’s case, didn’t arrive).
To anyone who has followed Dixon’s career, what happened next was no surprise: A 35-point explosion on 11 of 15 shooting and 10 for 10 from the free-throw line in the franchise’s most critical game in nearly two decades.
Just like he did in his days in College Park, Juan came through when his team needed him most.
He might not get the respect he deserves, but that doesn't matter to Juan Dixon. Unlike many of today's NBA players, Dixon takes pride in his game and when he shoots 1-10, as he did in Game 3, that hurts him more than any amount of criticism or disrespect could. And as he's demonstrated in the past, when Juan Dixon hurts, it's not long before opposing teams do too.