Will Blalock

Will Blalock

Blalock's recovery from a life-threatening stroke continues, as he gets back to nearer his NBA-calibre best. He started last year with the Maine Red Claws, and was traded after 25 games to the Reno Bighorns, for whom he averaged 11.8 points and 7.4 assists per game. Blalock has battled weight problems since his stroke, but he lost weight during the D-League season and improved as the campaign went along. Blalock turns 27 in February and will probably never get back to the NBA, but his good D-League season, aided by a decent summer league performance, should see some good European gigs in the near future.

Incidentally, Blalock was acquired by Reno for Russell Robinson in a midseason trade from Maine. As mentioned in an earlier post, Blalock is recovering from a stroke and has battled subsequent weight problems. His recovery has been lengthy, and his numbers have been slow to recover. But once he got to Reno, Blalock's numbers improved, and he ended up averaging 11.8 points and 7.4 rebounds for the Bighorns. It's taken a while, as is an unfortunate necessity, but he's getting back there. And that's good to see.

- Will Blalock

Blalock is in the D-League, a teammate of Bobbitt's at the Maine Red Claws. He got back into the NBA this October as a training camp invite of the Nets, but he never stood a chance of making the team due to the Nets contract situation, a contract situation which is also currently preventing from trading Eduardo Najera's 2010 unfriendly contract to the Mavericks. For the Red Calws, Blalock is averaging 6.3 points, 5.5 assists, 2.7 rebounds and 2.2 turnovers in 24 minutes per game, while struggling a bit with his weight.

But there is a reason for all of that.

In last year's Where Are They Now series, I wrote the following:

Will Blalock averages a piddly 5.6 points, 2.4 rebounds and 2.0 assists for Artland Dragons Quakenbrueck.

In the summer, I wrote this:

......while Will Blalock is very much a point guard, I don't think the answer to the Pacers' point guard problem lies in a man who averaged 4.5 points and 2.1 assists in the German league last season.

And at the start of training camp, I wrote this:

He spent the 2007/08 season mainly in the D-League (with a brief Israeli flirtation in there somewhere), and then he spent last year in Germany, where he averaged 4/2 for Quakenbrueck. That means he's gone from 4/2 in the German league to a spot on an NBA roster. Strange times.

What I was too busy being flippant to notice was that Will Blalock had a stroke in March 2008. I keep my ear pretty to the ground and have almost no life outside of basketball, yet somehow I did not know about this. It seems to have gotten MSM coverage at all, and while this article carries the story, it wasn't written until over a year after the fact. Therefore, the news completely bypassed me until Jonathan Givony told me about it yesterday.

Sorry, Will Blalock. And congratulations on your comeback thus far.

Also, there's some good news in there somewhere. Blalock is not what he was - yet - but he has returned from a stroke to play professional basketball to a pretty good standard. Another former NBA player to have had a stroke was Juaquin Hawkins, who suffered one in January 2008 while playing for the Gold Coast Blaze in Australia. He returned to play in Australia the following season, and also played in the IBL this summer. He was not as good as he was before the stroke, but that might well be explained by the way he just turned 36. The downward progression in his statistics is pretty normal for a man of that age.

This, therefore, should be good news to former Wizards and Hornets big man James Lang, who suffered a stroke only six weeks ago. Those two have returned to play the game coming back from the same ailment as he. And so for Lang, it's not over either.