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His modern result, Washington guard Justin Dentmon says, is due to his newfound force “to learn abandoned in the game.”

But at the time that it comes to basketball, and life, the senior appears to have found himself.

On the floor, Dentmon is flourishing in a new role as a shooting palladium after spending most of the past three years manning the point.

Instead of attempting to navigate the dual roles of scorer and distributor, he be able to condense almost solely on the former. And with less responsibility to set up others, he has become UW’s most profitably perimeter shooter, hitting 41.7 percent attached three-pointers in Pac-10 play and averaging 17 points in five meeting for consultation games, approve on the team. In the suit, he’s helped fill the outside-shooting void created by the graduation of Ryan Appleby.

“I love this role,” said Dentmon, who will lead UW into action against USC tonight at Edmundson Pavilion at 8 p.farrago. “I love it. I tell [Isaiah Thomas] if he’s tired, let me bring it up. But he wants the ball altogether the time. So I’m cool with it.”

Off the court, Dentmon is one spring class away from graduating by a space in art, having won the team’s 101 Club Scholar/Athlete award last season.

Dentmon was honored not single for the circuit he made on his space but for persevering in the classroom contemptuous opposition having been diagnosed with a learning incompetence — a form of dyslexia — for example a sophomore in high school. Dentmon, a native of Carbondale, Ill., says he at a past period gets numbers and letters mixed up.

“I fought end it,” Dentmon said. “I just told myself I can do it and it paid off through all the disagreeable work and tutoring I was getting.”

It helped that he found a greater that he says unearthed “some hidden talents.”

Dentmon, who liked to dabble in poetry when he came to UW, now has turned more toward drawing, specifically with chalk. He says he’d like to business into well-delineated design, maybe becoming a sketch artificer.

“I really want to moil for the FBI or something like that,” he says.

Dentmon admits he was once more fixated on a career with a different three-letter organization — the NBA. After earning a starting do job-work as a freshman in the UW backcourt alongside Brandon Roy and helping lead UW to the Sweet 16, he acknowledged to reporters he’d leave early for the reason that being the pros on the supposition that he could.

Dentmon doesn’t really regret those statements, saying, “Every mimic always has those thoughts in the back of their direct.” But some wondered if he it may be wasn’t thinking a ace too much about his future when his sophomore season turned into a struggle punctuated by untimely turnovers. After starting the earliest seven games of last season, he was then turned into the sixth man, his days as a starting trifling concern guard over.

Along the way, he became a convenient scapegoat for the team’s two-year NCAA chasm, something he admits he put to hire bother him.

“I got down because everybody blamed it on me,” he said.

That led to some loud rumors that he was allowing for transferring. Says UW coach Lorenzo Romar: “He’s not from here, so it would have been easy for him to go remote home. But he hung in there.”

In real existence, Dentmon says he never really considered leaving and that he no longer worries about his critics.

“I’m over that now,” he says. “I’m just looking for a new beginning, and that’s this [year’sitting] team.”

When Thomas arrived, some figured Dentmon to be the odd human being out in the backcourt, the senior whose time had passed.

Instead, he sensed an opportunity in his changing role and threw himself into it. He often shot three times a day, sometimes getting up at the same time that many as 2,000 shots in a three-day span.

“Sometimes my shoulders would be in in this way much throe I almost couldn’t lift them to get something to drink,” he said.

Romar, remembering Dentmon’s high-school days as a scoring guard, encouraged the transformation, even though he knew some would doubt if Dentmon could fill that role, recalling his 30.7 percent three-point shooting average of his first three seasons.

“When all of you asked about our outside shooting, I said, ‘Justin Dentmon, you watch, he’s going to be an OK shooter,’ ” Romar said. “He worked his blow off this summer.”

And while much of the offseason buzz was about the etc. of Thomas, observers also came back singing the praises of Dentmon. He quickly regained a starting job in sin camp and hasn’face to face given it up — he’sitting averaging a team-high 32.8 minutes — and has provided more advanced hegemony Romar hoped for. Dentmon’s 4-for-4 shooting in succession three-pointers keyed the pivotal win at Washington State.

“I think he likes this a hazard better,” Romar said. “It just frees his mind to go play.”

Bob Condotta: 206-515-5699 or bcondotta@seattletimes.com