Taking his shot

There was a year when Jordan Clarkson and Remy Martin would have played together—in the Asian Games in 2014—in a dream Gilas Pilipinas team that would have been littered with Filipino-Americans and would have reclaimed the gold medal in South Korea with ease.

Both point guards—who had glittering collegiate careers—could ultimately find themselves playing in one league if the 6-foot Martin does get selected in the next NBA Draft after foregoing his senior year with Arizona State and declaring availability for the coming proceedings where freshman Georgia guard Anthony Edwards looms as the hot top overall selection.

Like Clarkson, Martin is going for the big time after his junior year, and former Gilas coach Chot Reyes, who discovered both talents for what would have been that Asian Games team, admitted to being “surprised” by Martin’s move although he believes that “he could be selected late in the first round at best.”

Reyes said he has kept tabs of all of those players that were supposed to make that team—Clarkson, Martin, Stanley Pringle, Christian Standhardinger, Mo Tautuaa, etc.—and the current basketball landscape in the United States.

“He (Martin) has the talent and potential [to play in the NBA]. I was just surprised,” Reyes said of Martin’s Draft declaration. “I saw him even before he went to Arizona, he was still very young then. And I knew that he would have been a solid player for Gilas and a future NBA talent.

“Like the others that were supposed to be on that team, he (Martin) was very interested to play for the Philippines,” Reyes said.

The thing that prevented that team from coming together was the Asian Games rule that year that required players to have three years of residency in the country that they were playing for to become eligible.

“That would have been a very strong team,” Reyes said. “We really drew up that roster because we had a different team that played in the World Cup [in Seville, Spain], a couple of months before,” Reyes added. “It wouldn’t have been a good idea to bring that World Cup team to Korea because the players are already tired.”

For the meantime, Martin, despite his glowing credentials of 19.1 points, 3.1 rebounds and 4.1 assists for the Sun Devils, is not highly regarded among noted mock draft sites, which hasn’t listed him in the first 60 selections.