UConn's Price begins yet another comeback
A.J. Price knew he was coming back to college basketball this season even before his anterior cruciate ligament was torn to shreds at the end of last season. It was not the injury that sent him back to the Connecticut Huskies for another year.
It was reality.
Yes, if UConn somehow had made a Final Four run and he gained all sorts of positive buzz for his role in such a development and he had real NBA people projecting him as a top-15 draft pick, Price would have grabbed that opportunity.
"But I didn't see that happening,"
he said. "I was set on coming back."
Unlike Brandon Rush, whose blown knee forced him to return to Kansas last season after he entered the draft, Price is exactly where he figured he'd be. Except for all this rehab he's doing. That's something he never expected until he was prone on the court thinking about how Pitt forward Mike Cook had torn his ACL in a game against Duke a few months earlier.
"When it first happened I pretty much knew exactly what it was,"
Price said. "While I was laying on the floor, I realized I couldn't pick myself up off the ground, so I knew something was really wrong."
"One of the first things that came into mind: the Mike Cook play from Pittsburgh. It was the same exact move. I spoke to Mike a little after that game; he said he knew exactly what it was."
A.J. Price is in the middle of another major comeback. Price, who averaged 14.5 points and 5.8 assists per game as a junior, was playing in an NCAA Tournament first-round game against San Diego when he was injured. Eventually he got up and tried to think about finishing the game and helping his team reach the second round.
"I went into the back, tried to cut, and just couldn't do it,"
Price said. "I started preparing for next season."
The Huskies wound up losing on a late jumper by USD's De'Jon Jackson. They started preparing for next season, too.
When I wrote about Price just prior to the start of the 2008 postseason, I mentioned that he'd been resurrected either two or three times during his stay at UConn: from a near-fatal brain injury that kept him out of basketball as a freshman, from career-threatening misbehavior that got him suspended from the team for a year and, if you wanted to count it, from a crummy first season that resulted mostly from him missing two full years of competition.
Well, now he'll have to complete the comeback grand slam. The fourth will bring him back from a devastating injury.
"This won't be my first comeback,"
Price said, "and actually it's not the hardest one, either. I've been through worse. I know all I have to do is put in the work."
Price sees Rush, who helped get Kansas to the 2008 NCAA championship, as an inspiration.
"To see how well he came back and all the benefits he reaped from coming back -- it really shows what hard work can do."
