Across the pond, Aggie legends together again
On the hardwood, there have truly been some dynamic duos over the years.
Stockton and Malone. Jordan and Pippen. Magic and Kareem.
Even throw Kobe and Shaq in there.
But one particular inside-out tandem has one thing that none of these others can claim: being paired once in the United States, only to find themselves together once again, thousands of miles away, on a whole other continent.
That distinction lies with Spencer Nelson and Jaycee Carroll, whose games’ have both found their way to Spain’s Balkan Islands, with Gran Canaria of the EuroBasket European league.
It’s an experience both appreciate in this, their first season playing together since 2005 when Nelson, a senior that season, started alongside then-freshman Carroll.
“It’s been a lot of fun (playing together),” Carroll said. “It’s really been good after I guess four or five years not playing together and seeing him, to experience again his work ethic, his leadership, and learn from him how to adjust to playing in Europe.”
It’s a sentiment that Nelson, who was named to the Aggie All-Century team while still playing for USU as a senior, couldn’t help but echo.
“It’s been good,” said the six-foot-eight post player. “Obviously he’s changed and grown as a player, and I probably have since being a senior in college as well. Each of us has developed our game in different ways. Obviously he’s an incredible player, so it’s a great opportunity anytime to play with a incredible player. It’s been an enjoyable time so far.”
So far, their team has gone 7-4 in EuroCup play since the season began Sept. 29, while notching a 10-10 record in the Spanish League (through Feb. 7), which only includes teams within Spain. Carroll is still scoring in bunches, averaging 18.8 points on 42.3 percent shooting from long-range in 29.1 minutes per game. In fact, last season, while playing for Gran Canaria, he was EuroBasket’s leading scorer at 17.9 points per game.
Nelson currently averages 5.7 points and 3.6 rebounds per game in 16.7 minutes on the floor.
Nelson had a bit more to say about his own game and how it’s evolved since he left Logan as CollegeInsider.com’s Mid-Major Player of the Year in 2005.
“My outside shooting is better. I have more maturity,” he said, noting that it has been an attained skill even though he spent seven total years enrolled at Utah State following a medical redshirt year and an LDS mission.
Though it was a limitation in Aggie head coach Stew Morrill’s strict offensive structure, Nelson now lets them fly from long distance with regularity, shooting 34.1 percent in 41 attempts so far this season.
“Even though I was pretty old already, there’s just no substitute for experience, seeing and experiencing a lot of different things, just going out determined what I am going to do. I kind of evaluate it from a more experienced perspective now.”
Carroll acknowledged he has also improved upon a game which resulted in the former USU single-season 3-point percentage record of 49.8 percent, a record now owned by current Aggie Brian Green’s 50 percent clip last season.
“Overall, my game has become a lot more rounded,” said the Evanston, Wyo., native. “I handle the ball a lot more, play off pick-and-rolls. That’s not what I did at USU. There I was asked to run off screens and catch the ball and score. In Europe, I’ve been asked to be a playmaker for my team.”
Not that he didn’t make plays for teams that earned two NCAA Tournament and National Invitation Tournament (NIT) bids apiece over his career – it just came more exclusively from one position, and from the same spots on the floor, he said.
“I’m still a shooting guard, but now I handle the ball more like a point guard in our sets,” he said.
Since graduating from Utah State, both players have had several opportunities to play with NBA summer-league teams, with even some invitations to fall camps just before the final roster is cut in time for the regular season.
Nelson’s turn came first. He stayed with the Utah Jazz all the way through late October of 2005 before being one of two final players cut from the opening-game roster. The following summer also saw Nelson with the Jazz at the now-defunct Rocky Mountain Revue in Salt Lake City, followed by the Milwaukee Bucks’ summer league squad in 2007. No more opportunities came until Nelson took a financial risk in forgoing most of the 2009-10 EuroBasket season in favor of once again seeing fall camp with the Jazz in October of 2009.
It was a risk that Nelson said was well worth it.
“It was awesome,” said Nelson of the NBA opportunities. “Anyone that has the opportunity to go to camp, a lot go straight to Europe, and you gotta do what you gotta do and do what feels right. If that’s your dream to go play in the NBA, do it, I say.”
And that’s precisely the wish Nelson said he had as a young kid from Idaho.
“(In 2009) I still had the opportunity to wear a Jazz jersey, to play against regular NBA players, and got to experience off-court stuff, charter flights and the Ritz hotel,” he said. “For a kid from Pocatello, Idaho, to be able to do that, was better for a month than not at all.”
Yet Nelson, who believes he has three, perhaps four, years left for professional basketball, acknowledges that playing an official game against the likes of Kobe, LeBron and Dwight Howard are more than a long-shot at this point in time.
“I don’t know if the NBA is looking for a lot of 30-year-old slow, unathletic guys right now,” he said. “But you never know. Work hard, and take advantage of whatever opportunities come your way.”
Outside specialist Carroll, however, said he’s ready to give it another go, perhaps one more time.
“This year’s camps are still early too tell, with interest from the NBA,” Carroll said. “At this point, I’d probably enjoy giving it one more try.”
Yet the father of one, soon to be two, who married former Utah State cheerleader Baylee Roche before his senior season in 2007, knows what it would take to give him and his family that opportunity.
“I would be a neat basis for an NBA team, it would just kind of have to be a team where a roster spot was available, and they needed a shooting guard, slash point guard, to come fill that role,” Carroll said.
Carroll played for the New Jersey Nets in both the Rocky Mountain Revue and the Orlando Summer League in 2008 before also playing that same summer with Toronto in Las Vegas. He also had the opportunity to star for New Orleans’ summer team in 2009 before playing for Boston in the Orlando league and New York in Las Vegas last June and July.
Both players acknowledge that in the thrill of continuing their sports careers, new chapters in their lives, in the form of family, take top precedence. Carroll couldn’t stop gushing about the joys of now having one of his own.
“It’s really one of the neatest experiences ever,” he said. “Being gone on these road trips for four or five days, then being able to come back to my wife, is really the greatest joy in the world. Basketball is the greatest fun I could have, but being able to be with Baylee and Bella (his two-year-old daughter) in our living room is the greatest feeling in the world. There’s nothing better in the world than family.”
The newest, not-yet-named addition to their family will arrive in Spain in April.
Echoing his scoring-machine counterpart yet again, Nelson rebounded the comment almost as well as the 800 times he cleaned the glass in four collegiate seasons.
“A very wise man once said that no success can compensate for failure in the home,” he said, quoting the late Gordon B. Hinckley, former president of the LDS Church. “Basketball’s great, and you can succeed in it, but in the home are where the greatest joys or greatest sorrows come. I feel my body starting to deteriorate and know it won’t last forever, but I know my family will.”
Until that deterioration overcomes these two great athletes to the point that they can’t play professionally, count on them to continue to utilize the skills they refined in Cache Valley and have now further honed in lands abroad.
Not that they’ve forgotten their roots.
“Utah State is such a special place and a great place to go to college,” Nelson said. “Just enjoy it, because it’s great memories and great feelings about that. I have nothing but great memories.”
“Thanks for all the support I received at Utah State,” added Carroll. “It really became a home away from home. It was fun, it was exciting, and more than I expected it to be. It was a great four years of my life that I’ll never forget.”
–rhett.wilkinson@aggiemail.usu.edu
Spencer Nelson on a jump shot (Photo courtesy Bailey Carroll)