2010 Summer Signings, Part 3
June 16th, 2010
– David Noel, who was mentioned in the previous post as leaving French team Roanne, has landed another gig in the same country. He has signed with Paris-Levallois. – In other French league news, Le Mans have released Marc Salyers, who had an uncharacteristically average season. Salyers averaged only 11.7 points and 4.5 rebounds per game in the French league – good numbers, but not the star they assumed they were getting. The team also released Zack Wright, the best rebounding 6’2 guard you ever saw (26.9 mpg, 8.9 ppg, 5.6 rpg, 4.4 apg) while choosing to sign former Gonzaga big man J.P. Batista (13.4 ppg, 5.2 rpg) to a two-year extension. And fellow Pro A side Vichy signed Villanova forward Curtis Sumpter, who had previously been with Belgian team Dexia Mons-Hainaut. – The man Sumpter replaces in Vichy is Brent Petway, the athletic Michigan alum who has spent time around the NBA in summer leagues, training camps, the D-League and the like. He’s taking the strange step of moving down a level, going to French second division side Clermont for next season. Not many decent players play in the Pro B, but another one who will be is Marcus Campbell, the ex-Mississippi State big man and training camp veteran who has spent almost all of his career in the American minor leagues, and who has had NBA training camp contracts from the Rockets and Bobcats. – Rather than going to France, Mouhamed Sene is leaving it. Sene led the French league in both rebounds and blocks season and was named a joint winner of the Defensive Player of the Year award, but he’s making a lateral move to Belgium to play for Charleroi. Sene was playing in Belgium before his NBA career began, and hopefully he can improve upon […]
2010 Summer Signings, Part 2
June 11th, 2010
– Maccabi Tel-Aviv declined their contract option on former Warriors draft pick Stephane Lasme. The Raptors are said to have been scouting him, alongside his Maccabi frontcourt teammate D’Or Fischer. Granted, the Israeli press are notorious for making things up, and the now-27-year- old Lasme is coming off a bad year and has hardly added the missing dimensions to his somewhat one-dimensional game. But then again, Amir Johnson becomes an unrestricted free agent in three weeks time. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not. – Other guys not being invited back include Steve Burtt Jr, who will not stay with Ukrainian team Ferro-ZNTU. French club Roanne are not retaining ex-Bucks draft pick David Noel, and another ex-Bucks player Jiri Welsch is leaving Unicaja Malaga after four seasons. Malaga simultaneously exercised a contract option on Omar Cook, which was always going to happen. – Two players who left their clubs midway through last season, only to return, have now left them again. Australian international Brad Newley left Besiktas towards the end of last year as the team had fallen more than the allowable amount behind on his payment schedule – it is customary for teams to be allowed to fall a certain amount behind on payments before a player is allowed to break the contract with all obligations, both future and outstanding, still owed to them. Newley did this once the team had fallen several thousand dollars behind on his pay, and agreed to sign with AJ Milano for the remainder of the Serie A season. However, due to paperwork errors, FIBA blocked the transfer and Newley had to return to Besiktas for the remainder of the season. With it now over for good, Newley has left the team again and signed in Lithuania for Lietuvos Rytas (who, incidentally, elected to keep Milko Bjelica […]
Where Are They Now, 2010; Part 48
April 11th, 2010
– Brad Newley The Rockets seem to have an untoward number of draft picks who never play in the NBA, as well as an uncanny knack for accumulating unwanted draft rights from other teams. They currently have nine unsigned draft picks, most in the NBA, and while quite a few of them weren’t their own picks, Newley was. The Australian guard spent his first two years after being drafted in Greece, but moved to Turkey this summer to play for Besiktas. He has averaged 16.1 points and 4.4 rebounds in Turkish league play, while upping his three-point percentage from 32% last year to 43% this year. Newley missed two months of the year due to injury, but it didn’t take him long to pick up from where he left off. In fact, his only single digit outing of the year was in the season opener. – Jared Newson Jared Newson is a kind of small but very athletic swingman out of Tennessee Martin (perhaps more famous for Lester Hudson), who made the Mavericks’ training camp roster in 2007 after a strong summer league performance for them. This is his fourth professional season; he spent two of his first three in Germany, and one in Australia. Martin spent this year in the D-League, split between the Sioux Falls Skyforce and the Bakersfield Jam. Between the two of them, Newson has averaged 23 minutes, 9.2 points and 3.9 rebounds per game, shooting 47% from the field and 30% from three. – Drew Nicholas Maryland alum Drew Nicholas is playing his second season with Panathinaikos, last year’s EuroLeague champions. Functioning as a shooting specialist, Nicholas is averaging 10.0 points in 19 minutes per game in the Greek league, alongside 10.9 ppg in 27.0 mpg in the EuroLeague. He is shooting 42% […]
2009 NBA Summer League round-up: New York Knicks
July 15th, 2009
– Wink Adams: Adams just graduated from UNLV, where his senior season numbers were down across the board. He averaged 14.3 points, 4.1 rebounds and 2.8 assists, shooting only 37% from the field. As a general rule, 6’0 guards that shoot 37% don’t make it in the NBA, but Wink clearly has something to show. – Alex Acker: Acker started last year with the Pistons, who salary-dumped him onto the Clippers. He scored 63 points on 65 shots in the NBA last year, which isn’t good efficiency. He also spent four games on assignment to the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, averaging 18.0 points and 5.3 rebounds, but the Clippers declined his team option and didn’t make him a restricted free agent. That’s not a glowing endorsement. – Blake Ahearn: Ahearn was covered here. If he can show some rudimentary point guard skills suited to the Knicks’ high octane offence, then he has a chance. But the Knicks are damn short of roster spots. They have 16 under contract already, and that’s before a single free agency move. This presents a problem for Ahearn. – Morris Almond: Utah are so tax concerned right now that they had to decline Almond’s third year option, even though it was very cheap and he didn’t really do anything wrong. Almond doesn’t have a complete all-around game – he’s pretty much only a scorer. But even though he barely played in the NBA, and didn’t do much in his time in it, he was drafted to be a scorer, and score he did. He averaged 25.6 points per game in the D-League in 2007/08, and last year averaged 22.4 points in 29.8 minutes. Of course, Almond didn’t pass at all to score that many, averaging 1.1 assists per game. But he scored […]
Where Are They Now, 2009; Part 37
February 24th, 2009
– Juan Carlos Navarro is back with Barcelona, and he’ll probably never leave again. He is technically still a restricted NBA free agent of the Memphis Grizzlies, but that’s kind of meaningless, because he has no rhyme, reason, or (I assume) desire to leave Spain again. Navarro averages 15.4 points and 2.8 assists in the Spanish league, alongside 14.0 points and 3.6 assists in the EuroLeague. – Boniface N’Dong still boasts one of the greatest names in human history. In his second season for Unicaja Malaga, as a starlet on the ultimate “oh yeah, I remember them, whatever happened to them” team (also featuring Omar Cook, Jiri Welsch, Robert Archibald, Marcus Haislip and, until recently, Paul Shirley), Ndong is averaging 11.3 points in less than 20 mpg in the EuroLeague. That’s pretty damn good for anyone, but especially a centre. He also has 5.3 rebounds and 1.5 blocks a game to go along with that, and his Spanish league numbers (18.5 mpg, 9 ppg, 4.5 rg, 1.0 bpg) aren’t bad either. – Drew Neitzel is with the Artland Dragons of Quackenbrueck in Germany. Somebody had told me that he was going to leave the team, but apparently that somebody was wrong. Neitzel (whose name sounds like a cough syrup that you take before going to bed) averages 6.4 points and 3.2 assists in the German league, alongside 9.6 points and 4.0 assists in the EuroCup. – Matt Nelson is unsigned after playing in France last season. – Spencer Nelson is playing for Aris in Greece, a team whose recent additions included Bengal cats owner and former Minnesota Timberwolves guard Bracey Wright, as well as seminal British star Andy Betts. Spiceworld. Nelson averages 8.2 points and 7.1 rebounds in the Greek league, alongside 10.6 points, 6.4 rebounds […]
