Jaric Understands It’s Time to Put Up

If the Clippers’ starting point guard was insulted last season when the team continually talked about its need to upgrade the position -- or that it used its two draft picks in June to take point guards -- he doesn’t let it show.

Marko Jaric freely admits that he is a work in progress.

That’s one reason why, despite intense pressure from back home in Serbia and Montenegro, he turned down an opportunity to play in the Athens Olympics, instead spending most of the summer in Los Angeles recuperating from a foot injury and preparing for his third NBA season.

Due to become a restricted free agent July 1, he is penciled in as a starter, if only because the Clippers don’t want to rush 19-year-old Shaun Livingston.

Five days shy of his 26th birthday, he’s at a career crossroads.

“Not only [because of] the contract,” he said this week at training camp in Santa Barbara. “It’s my year to show if I’m ready to improve and really be one of the good point guards in this league, or if I’m going to be somebody in the middle -- which I would hate, honestly.

“So, it’s a very important season for me, personally.”

The Clippers would love to re-sign the 6-foot-7 Jaric next summer. But they’re more enamored of his versatility than his playmaking ability, which is why they drafted Livingston and Lionel Chalmers.

“When I look at players,” Coach Mike Dunleavy said, “I look at a guy and I say, ‘Where does that guy fit on a championship team?’ And when I look at Marko Jaric, I look at a guy that I think is a terrific combo guard, a guy that can play point guard and [shooting] guard on a very high-level team. Whether he can make the improvements to be a lead point guard on a championship team, I don’t know. That’s a part of what he went through this summer.

“But overall as a player I really like him. As a competitor, I really like him. He definitely has a role and a place.”

Whether it’s at the point is up to him.

“That’s my position,” said Jaric, who averaged 8.5 points and 4.8 assists last season. “But of course I can adjust. I’ll do anything for this team to win. If you’re going to play me at [center], that’s fine with me. But my position is point guard. And that’s what I’ve always wanted to be.”

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Because of a strained right quadriceps, backup center Zeljko Rebraca was held out of the second half of Wednesday’s morning practice.... Jaric is joining conditioning drills despite a broken left thumb and is “probably in the best condition of anybody we have on the team,” Dunleavy said.