Wallace chasing his dream

With his Princeton basketball career now over, Judson Wallace joined 63 other senior standouts from across the nation at the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament last weekend and helped his team, Portsmouth Sports Club, win the tournament championship.

The annual four-day tournament — which draws hundreds of NBA representatives to Portsmouth, Va. — provided players with the chance to show off their skills and earn a prized invitation to the more prestigious Chicago pre-draft camp this June. Wallace, whose averages of 12.2 points and 4.9 rebounds per game this season led the Tigers but were overshadowed by the team's disappointing 6-8 Ivy League record, feels that he benefited from the opportunity.

"I thought I did well," Wallace said. "I had a chance to talk to guys like [Indiana Pacers president of basketball operations] Larry Bird and [Boston Celtics president of basketball operations] Danny Ainge afterwards, and everybody thought that I had a good chance of getting invited to Chicago."

While players taking part in the Portsmouth Invitational are exclusively college seniors and generally hail from smaller schools, the 66 spots for the Chicago camp will be open to juniors, underclassmen and international players as well. In Chicago, players will try to solidify themselves as late first-round or second-round selections in the NBA Draft on June 28. Many will not be drafted, though, and will instead attempt to latch on to a pro team through free agency.

But even with many hurdles still remaining to be cleared, Wallace can now consider himself one small step closer to the dream of being drafted. Over three games, Wallace posted averages of 9.7 points, 6.0 rebounds and 1.7 blocks against elite competition as his squad marched to three consecutive wins. In an 101-91 victory over Holiday Inn Portsmouth in the championship game, Wallace chipped in nine points, seven rebounds and two blocks.

Wallace's most impressive performance came in his team's first game, as he poured in 13 points in just 21 minutes on four-of-seven shooting. Overall, though, Wallace shot just 40 percent from the field and made good on only one of five three-point attempts.

"I didn't shoot the ball as well as I wanted to," Wallace said. "I've been working on my thesis these past couple weeks, and I'm still recovering from my back injury, so I wasn't in the shape I needed to be in. I'm gonna get to work over the next few weeks and try to get where I need to be strength-wise."

Despite having been less than 100 percent physically, Wallace feels that it is important for him to have had a chance to put his game on display outside the Princeton offense. Indeed, the Tigers' team-oriented style of play is rarely conducive to piling up individual statistics.

"Nobody at Princeton puts up numbers," Wallace said, "so winning is the only thing that really attracts scouts."

And after the Tigers struggled so mightily this season, Wallace needed a second chance to show NBA teams why they should consider drafting him.

"Scouts like me because I can shoot well, crash the boards and find the open man," Wallace said. "Those are all things that I learned at Princeton."

At the same time, though, Wallace believes that a certain stigma is often attached to players coming out of schools like Princeton — a stigma that playing at Portsmouth gave him a chance to erase.

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"The knock on kids from the Ivy League is that they don't run," Wallace said. "I'm a big fan of the fast break. I love to get out and run. [At Portsmouth], I always made sure to run, even when I wasn't gonna get the ball."

Wallace says he sees those same traits in the game of Troy Murphy, a Golden State Warriors forward who shares that willingness to hustle constantly. A gritty rebounder and consistent midrange shooter, Murphy is the player Wallace says he models his own development on.

For a Portsmouth veteran like Wallace to blossom into an athlete of Murphy's caliber is by no means unprecedented. Alumni of the tournament, now in its 53rd year, include former NBA stars like Scottie Pippen, John Stockton and Rick Barry, as well as current players Ben Wallace and Cuttino Mobley.

All of those big names were once soon-to-be college graduates striving to find some way to gain admittance into the NBA — Pippen and Stockton were virtually unheard of before they played at Portsmouth. Wallace has a long way to go before joining their heady ranks, but he seems to be doing all the right things in his effort to get there.