2010 Summer League Rosters: New York Knicks
July 15th, 2010
Eric Boateng Boateng is an English centre who played one year at Duke, before transferring to Arizona State, where he just completed his senior season. He barely played at all in his first four seasons, but finally got a chance to play last year, and responded with averages of 8.8ppg and 7.2rpg on 66% shooting. However, even though he turns 25 in November, Boateng is still an incredibly raw player. He turned it over 2.1 times per game in only 27 minutes, despite not taking any dribbles at any point, and shot only 50% from the foul line. He’s also not much of a shot-blocker; essentially, he’s a 6’10 slightly above average rebounder. Boateng will play for the Great Britain national team this summer, but mainly others won’t. Joel Freeland and Ben Gordon just dropped out this week due to injury, and earlier, Robert Archibald had also pulled out. Nick George and Andy Betts have also pulled out, leaving the team with almost no quality left on it, and its chances of qualifying for Eurobasket 2011 in tatters. This is why Luol Deng is so unbelievably freaking important to us. He is now our everything. Anyway, I’ve tangented. Jaycee Carroll Carroll was covered in the Celtics summer league roster round-up of last week. He starred for Boston, averaging 14.8 points, 3.8 rebounds and 2.8 assists per game, showing the all-around offensive game for which he is known. Warren Carter Carter signed with the Knicks for training camp last season, but lost out on a roster spot. The Knicks kept Marcus Landry at small forward, and left the 15th post open – unbeknownst to us all, they were saving it for Jonathan Bender. Carter therefore went to Greece to play for Ilysiakos, averaging 12.9 points, 7.0 rebounds and 3.1 fouls per […]
2009 NBA Summer League round-up: Boston Celtics
July 4th, 2009
Beginning now, there will be a series of posts detailing the summer league rosters of every NBA team this year. This is because summer league is great fun, and because the lavish descriptions of fringe NBA players gets me going. But you probably knew that already. We begin this excitement with the Boston Celtics, since the alphabetically superior Atlanta Hawks don’t have a summer league team this year. – Nick Fazekas: Fazekas should be in the NBA, really. But he’s not. Even though he was paid $711,517 by the Mavericks last season, Fazekas wasn’t on their roster, as they waived him as a concurrent part of the Jason Kidd trade eighteen months ago. This decision would have been forgettable had the Mavericks not had the quad Devean George, Antoine Wright, Jerry Stackhouse and Shawne Williams on their roster last season, but anyway. Fazekas went to camp with the Nuggets last season, as did pretty much every player in the history of the game, and then spent the year with Oostende in Belgium and ASVEL Villeurbanne in France. I’d like to think that the team that has employed Brian Scalabrine for four years could find a spot for a similar but younger player like Fazekas, but it doesn’t seem likely. – J.R. Giddens: Giddens played all of eight minutes with the Celtics last year. There’s no real need for this 24-year-old non-contributor to be on the roster of a veteran team with championship aspirations, but his D-League numbers from last year (36 games, 17.2 ppg, 6.3 rpg, 3.0 apg, 1.4 bpg, 58% shooting) suggest that there might be something for someone to pursue there. There’d better be, since the Celtics used a first-rounder on him. Giddens still doesn’t have a consistent jump shot, however, which still doesn’t help him. – Lester […]