In the most outrageous game, Axton scored 30 points and dished out 22 assists.
That meant he had been involved in two-thirds of his team's points that night.
Even with so many crucial points and assists, he had done an excellent job of limiting his turnovers, averaging just 1.3 per game.
His assist-to-turnover ratio reached 10:1. It was downright ridiculous.
Under his leadership, his college team's record began climbing again, and his draft stock rose right along with it, eventually returning to the top three.
During this year's March Madness, he had been brilliant one game and awful the next, but in the end, he had still led his college team to the NCAA championship.
Against that backdrop, the Spurs used the Top Pick to select Axton Downey.
Axton, his family and friends, the fans, and the media all thought it was the best possible outcome.
Axton had the ability and outstanding athletic gifts. What he lacked was consistency.
The Spurs had always been a steady team. Under Coach Popovich's guidance in particular, his players were nearly all known for their consistency.
His teams were known for playing a steady brand of basketball, too.
Back in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it wasn't yet the small-ball era, and players weren't nearly as obsessed with three-pointers as they were now.
When no team averaged even a hundred points per game, fans all shared the same understanding: if you fell more than ten points behind another team, you might think the game was getting hard to chase. But if you trailed the Spurs by five, coming back was nearly impossible. They could use that five-point lead to keep you pinned down.
So the Spurs could be summed up in one word: steady!
Steady as a rock.
Even now, in the