Where Are They Now, 2010; Part 68
May 18th, 2010
– Samo Udrih Beno’s brother started the year back in his native Slovenia, having not retained his place at Estudiantes Madrid. The one-time Maverick averaged 13.2 points, 4.6 rebounds and 3.1 assists for Hopsi, while waiting for a better offer to come in. In January, one did, and Udrih moved to Croatia to play for Cibona Zagreb. For them he averaged 7.3 points down the stretch of their EuroLeague campaign, 9.0 ppg in the Adriatic League and 9.4 ppg in the Croatian league. – Ejike Ugboaja Cavaliers draft pick Ugboaja’s professional career before this season has read; Nigeria, Poland, Cyprus, D-League, and Iran. There’s not a whole lot of pedigree there, not helped by the fact that he averaged only 3/3 for the Cavaliers’ own D-League affiliate before being released. However, this year has seen Ejike bounce back a bit. He started the year with Azovmash in Ukraine, averaging 9.1 points and 5.9 rebounds in only 15 minutes per game in the Ukrainian Superleague. He left in December and returned to Iran to play for Petrochimi, where statistics are unfortunately unavailable. Nevertheless, he produced quite a lot in a better quality of league than usual. It’s something to build from. Here are all the players drafted by the Cavaliers after the 2003 draft (the LeBron James draft): – Luke Jackson (10th, 2004) – Anderson Varejao (30th, 2004; technically drafted by Orlando, but done so for Cleveland) – Martynas Andriuscabbages (44th, 2005; technically drafted by Houston, but again done so for Cleveland) – Shannon Brown (25th, 2006) – Daniel Gibson (42nd, 2006) – Ejike Ugboaja (55th, 2006) – J.J. Hickson (19th, 2008) – Darnell Jackson (52nd, 2008; technically drafted by Miami, etc) – Christian Eyenga (30th, 2009) – Danny Green (46th, 2009) – Emir Preldzic (57th, 2009, Phoenix) It’s a largely-miss […]
The NBA bench player handbook
August 19th, 2007
For those amongst you who, like me, have a strange fascination with transactions, both those finalized and those possible, this is a bad time of year for you. This is late August, the draft is long since gone, and most of the juicy bits of free agency have passed us by. Of the remaining free agents, only a select few are good enough to be starters in this league – Ruben Patterson to name……one – and merely the journeymen remain. This is the NBA’s equivalent of what it’s like to try and completely scrape clean an almost-empty pot of jam – you can try and try and try to clean every last morsel out of the jar, and occasionally strike it lucky with a decent-sized chunk. But most of the residual jam offers up stubborn resistance, and is not even worth your time – even if there was a practical way of getting it off there, you wouldn’t garner anything useful from it anyway. Additionally, when writing these new player profiles for the site, I have had a very tough time trying to keep them interesting. How, for example, do you make the profile of JamesOn Curry read wildly different to that of Jannero Pargo or Salim Stoudamire, when they are similar players? It’s a quandary that has cropped up all too often. Too many players are too alike too many other players, and too many players conform to stereotypes. So, let’s look at those stereotypes and give them broad definitions based around the pioneer – the trendsetter, if you will – of that particular stereotype. Every team needs their role players, after all. 1 – The Jerome Williams: The athletic forward whose main skill is the fact that they are an athletic forward. They’re too small to play […]
