Gary Neal: Rookie, San Antonio Spur, and a Very Bad Man

Gary Neal is a bad dude. 

Nobody would ever think that, seeing as how he plays for a team that is comprised of some of the nicest guys in the league. But let me redefine the word bad for you. Urban Dictionary gives us the truest essence of badness: "What Michael Jackson told us he was all along." 

I repeat: Gary Neal is a bad dude.

He led Auberdeen to the high school state championship, averaging a triple-double for the season. The stirrings of badness.

The talented La Salle freshman then proceeded to make the Atlantic Ten his playground, dropping 18.6 per a night and netting conference Rookie of the Year honors. The future seemed bright for the 6'4" guard. But then the scandal struck.

A 19-year-old basketball player from the University of New Haven accused Neal and two other teammates of rape; Neal's lawyer claimed it was consensual. Both New Haven's and La Salle's coaches resigned.

Neal was dealing with a different kind of bad now, the kind that took away dreams and paths to the NBA. La Salle dismissed him from the program and Neal was left on the outside looking in. "I wasn't playing basketball anywhere, I didn't have a scholarship. I was just Gary Neal," he said.

So what does a man do when he's locked out of his dreams? Go right through a window. Towson University proved to be just that, guaranteeing him a walk-on spot pending the results of his trial. 2005 witnessed his full acquittal, and Neal was free to resume his badness, but this time only on the court.

And boy, did the court receive his full attention. Neal torched the CAA conference to the tune of 25 ppg, good enough for fifth in the nation, his junior season so outstanding that entering his senior year Sporting News had him as the best shooting guard in the nation.

But apparently that wasn't good enough for any NBA team, as Neal somehow went undrafted. Talent don't lie, though, and a move overseas to the Euro leagues found him leading both the Turkish and Italian league in scoring. Not bad. But Gary Neal is a bad man, and he wasn't satisfied with "not bad." He knew he could be badder, and he wasn't the only one thought so.

"This was a kid who had incredible determination and work ethic," said Coach Kennedy of Towson. "He was going to make the NBA. That was just something Gary Neal was going to do."

Neal played so well in the 2010 NBA Summer League that the Spurs signed him on the spot, inking him to a three-year deal. Insiders knew this was just another typical Spurs move, finding hidden gems like Parker and Ginobili and building their system around their stars' unique strengths.

Gary Neal's strength? "It's his confidence," says teammate Richard Jefferson. "It's his fearlessness," says Ginobili. What they're really saying is that Gary Neal is a bad man. His aggressive approach coupled with his sweet stroke has him drilling almost two treys a game at a cool 41 percent clip.

Perhaps the defining moment of Neal's rookie season so far was the end of the third quarter in the Spurs' intense recent game against the Oklahoma City Thunder. With 20 seconds left and the Thunder chipping away at the Spurs' once indomitable lead, Coach Pop thought it'd be a good opportunity to run a play and end the quarter with a good shot.

But good was never in Neal's vocabulary, probably never will be, and instead of passing back out to Parker, Neal calmly stepped back behind the line, hesitated ever so slightly to throw Durant off-balance, then calmly sank a dagger over the mile-high Durantularms. 

"Might've been some furniture moving if I had missed," Neal said almost ruefully after the game. "I was wondering when the trade deadline was," joked Coach Popovich, when asked what was going through his mind when Neal took the shot. But with all joking side, the shot shouldn't have surprised anyone who's been following Neal's unlikely road to the pros.

But then again, Neal has been surprising everyone since his triple-double dropping days at Auberdeen, and the latest victim was old Coach Pop himself. "I didn't think he would be this courageous," admitted Coach Popovich candidly once in an interview, "to step up and to know this is your chance. If you don't [make shots], you go back to ground zero."

But when you look at his rape trial, losing his scholarship, going undrafted and playing on foreign soil, taking a free shot at the NBA doesn't seem like a chance at all—it feels like playing with house money. All Neal has done is bear immediate dividends for the Spurs, who lobbied "what-the-hell" money to the 26-year-old guard and compelled Coach Pop to say, "He's even better than we expected."

Well, of course he is.

He's Gary Neal, and he's been telling that he's been this good—or this bad—all along.