Signed on the eve of training camp, Price doesn’t have a guaranteed contract. Yet the 31-year-old point guard started five out of seven exhibition games and might have continued that streak on opening night of the regular season, save for a right knee bone bruise—the result of a collision with Darren Collison of the Sacramento Kings during the last game of the preseason.
Banging into opponents is nothing new for Price, a player with plenty of speed on the offensive end and a dogged defensive intensity.
Speaking with Dave Miller for TWC SportsNet, the veteran guard elaborated on his priorities:
I pride myself on defense. That’s the only thing on the basketball court that I can control. I can’t control whether shots are going in, or if things like that are happening for me. But the one thing I can control is the way I compete on the defensive end. That’s something that takes effort and takes discipline every night.
Price was only 5’7” when he graduated high school in Friendswood, Texas. College scouts weren’t exactly knocking down his door with offers. But the diminutive guard walked onto the basketball team at Nicholls State in Thibodaux, Louisiana, attracting enough attention as a freshman to earn a scholarship to Utah Valley State, which was then a junior college in the process of becoming a university.
College can be a time of unexpected growth in many ways—Price shot up by a remarkable seven inches to 6’2” by the time he graduated. He was named Division I Independent Player of the Year as a senior—Utah Valley still had provisional status in 2005.
