By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

On the strength of a blistering summer-league debut, Marco Belinelli was an instant fan favorite at Oracle Arena last season.

This year, he plans on earning his adulation.

After a rookie season that never lived up to the promise of the 37-point barrage he unleashed in the desert, Belinelli took stock of his performance — a mere 240 minutes on the floor, 38.7 percent shooting, far too much time modeling Italian fashion on the bench — and spent the summer retooling his game. He spent several extra weeks in Oakland, transforming flab into muscle, honing a seldom-before-seen defensive edge, and trading the panache of that patented leg-kick follow through in favor of improved balance and consistency on his jumper.

The results? Belinelli is the Warriors’ leading scorer through three exhibition games, capped off by a 22-point, six-assist performance against Oklahoma City on Saturday that moved Don Nelson to call it “his best game that I’ve seen.”

“I think it’s different because this is my second year, and I’m not a rookie,” Belinelli said via phone Wednesday morning from Guangzhou, China, where the Warriors were readying to play the Bucks at 8 p.m. (5 a.m. Pacific time). “Everything was new for me, the coaches, the players, the type of the game. Now, I know the coaches, what the coach want from me. . . . I know I can help this team. I want to play.”

Whether he’ll get to do that is still an open question. Nelson said last week that Belinelli is still third on the depth chart at shooting guard, behind incumbent Stephen Jackson and third-year reserve Kelenna Azubuike. But if Belinelli keeps putting up efforts such as the one he had Saturday, he could alter that equation.

“Marco, he’s coming back with a chip on his shoulder,” Warriors forward Al Harrington said Saturday. “Not only did he show it to you today, he shows it to us every day in practice. He’s been very productive. We’re proud of him. It seems like he’s really focused in on taking care of his body, and obviously you know he can shoot the ball. He just had to get his confidence back, and it seems like he’s rolling, so we just need to keep pushing him, and everybody needs to keep encouraging him.”

The numbers are encouraging enough in their own right. Belinelli is shooting 56.5 percent, 62.5 on 3-pointers, and seems to have found…

About that post where I said DeMarcus Nelson was the player least likely to make the Warriors’ roster? Just go ahead and delete that from your RSS feeds, please.

Barring a tumble off the Great Wall this week or some other injury catastrophe, the Vallejo product who grew up watching the Warriors should be a Warrior when the regular season begins Oct. 29.

Nelson drew uniform raves Saturday after starting at the point and proceeding to knock down eight of 10 shots, record seven assists and create four steals against just two turnovers in 33 minutes against Oklahoma City.

Don Nelson started off his postgame remarks with a remark to those doubters in the audience (“Well, now you know why I like the guy”), and teammates Al Harrington and Stephen Jackson both gave him unqualified support in his bid to beat out fellow guards Dan Dickau and Anthony Morrow in a bid for one of the Warriors’ last roster spots.

“I’m not surprising myself, because first I have to have confidence in myself before anybody else can believe in me,” DeMarcus Nelson said. “And the things that I’m doing now are the things that I’ve been doing all my life. I think now it’s just people are starting to get a better understanding of how good or how effective it can be at this level.”

It started on the first on the Warriors’ possession of the night, when Marco Belinelli kicked a pass out to Nelson on the left wing and he knocked down an open 18-footer, a jab at those folks who don’t believe in his shot (don’t know who that could be…). It didn’t stop until he rocked a pair of dunks in the second half that brought the house down.

“He has my vote to make the team,” Harrington said. “Hopefully he did enough tonight to show that he wants to be a Warrior. And I think that he’ll bring a very interesting dynamic to this team, something very different than what we get from most point guards. To me, he plays like in his mind he’s 7 feet tall. That’s big. He’s a guard that could not only distribute the ball, but he’ll help with rebounding and is definitely going to be a presence defensively, so I think that’s definitely a guy that we should have around for 82 games, because we’ll need him at some point.”

Since Nelson is officially listed…