NBA Draft Combine update: PJ Dozier dunks, Sindarius Thornwell dishes on Kevin Durant

The NBA Draft combine is wrapped up and two South Carolina Gamecocks have stock soaring higher than Enron pre-2001.

By now it would have been hard to ignore that PJ Dozier threw down arguably the most impressive dunk in the 5-on-5 scrimmages. However if you’d been hiding out in a bunker the past 24 hours and haven’t seen the clip yet, we’ve got you covered.

The collective “oh!” from Rece Davis and Fran Fraschilla pretty well sum up that hammer Dozier threw down. The dunk overshadowed the fact Dozier scored 15 points on 7-of-12 shooting and wound up being one of the better players of the floor during his team’s scrimmage. He averaged 10.5 points per game between his two scrimmages and measured out being one of the biggest guards at the draft.

His size plus his scrimmage performances have created quite the buzz around his draft stock. During the NCAA tournament run Dozier was overshadowed by Thornwell’s alpha dog play, but now that Dozier isn’t playing alongside his Gamecock running mate scouts and writers have been able to see him in his own right.

In NBA Draft Net’s latest post combine mock draft Dozier is going No. 28 to the Los Angeles Lakers, however of all the major mocks that’s the only one where he’s going in round one. Take the mock draft with a grain of salt if you’d like, but there’s no doubt it’s been cool as a Gamecock fan to see Dozier get this much buzz from NBA Twitter.

However don’t sleep on Thornwell when it comes to a rising Gamecock draft stock. Thronwell only shot 2-of-6 in his second scrimmage, but even without a flashy game two Thronwell has met with nearly half the league and already had workouts scheduled with a few other.

So far in the mock drafts Bleacher Report has Sindarius Thornwell going the highest at No. 24 to the Utah Jazz, but much like Dozier he’s goes in the second round in every other major mock. It’s odd after two days of evaluation no one can still agree where Thornwell and Dozier will land even if they have apparent rising stock.

But what was probably the most interesting thing to happen with Thornwell at the combine was him responding to Kevin Durant’s comments about how the draft combine was “useless”. For those unaware Kevin Durant was dinged for his combine performance because he couldn’t bench press 185 pounds, but still was the No. 2 overall pick and went on to be an MVP.

Someone asked Thornwell about those comments and he responded as such:

The next step in the NBA Draft process is the lottery, set to take place on Tuesday at 8 p.m. on ESPN.