2010 Summer League Rosters: Golden State Warriors
July 11th, 2010
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. Andre Brown Brown is back for his seventh consecutive season on the cusp of the NBA. After hundreds and millions of summer league appearances, mini-camp tryouts and training camp contracts, the former DePaul forward has 75 NBA games played to his credit, and is looking for the big three figures. Brown is athletic and a good rebounder, but is not without his flaws; his defence is more energetic than effective, he never ever passes, and his jump shot and free throw strokes are poor due to a bad cross-handed release that he has never corrected. Brown is 29 years old now and hasn’t got any better; what he is is pretty good, but what he is is permanently juuuuuust on the outside. Brian Chase Chase is a 5’9 scoring guard with a 1:1 assist-to-turnover ratio. That doesn’t bode well for a man’s NBA prospects. Chase has actually spent time on an NBA regular season roster when he spent the first two weeks of the 2006-07 season with the Utah Jazz; however, he did not appear in any games. More than a little bit like Earl Boykins, Chase is extremely quick and a very […]
Where Are They Now, 2010; Part 52
April 13th, 2010
– Pavel Podkolzin After his NBA career set new records in failure, Podkolzin returned to his native Russia to play for Lokomotiv Novosybirsk, the team he began his career with. Podkolzin is into his fourth season with the team, and has stuck with them even after they were relegated out of the Russian Superleague down to the second division. Statistics are hard to come across, because they’re all in Russian, and Russians use the wrong alphabet. However, as far as I can tell, Pavel averages 12.9 points, 5.6 rebounds and 3.9 fouls per game. On the Novosybirsk website, three players are listed as playing the position of “центровой.” Pavel is one of them, and a quick internet search reveals the obvious; that word translates as “center”. But curiously, if you run that word through Google Translate, it comes out with the result “Washington Bullets.” I’m not making that up, either. – Scot Pollard Pollard last played in the NBA with the championship-winning 2007-08 Celtics. He didn’t play in the postseason and barely played during the regular season, but he got a ring and a million for sitting around and putting up with a year of ankle pain, so it’s not all bad. He now works for NBA TV, where he’s already created one of the more awkward moments in television history. – Olden Polynice Polynice was last in the NBA in February 2004, when the Clippers waived the then-39-year-old before the playoff deadline so that he could catch on with another NBA team. He didn’t. But Polynice did squeeze out bit parts of two more years in the world of professional basketball, playing 18 games in 2004/05 with the Michigan Mayhem of the CBA, and briefly being the player/coach for the Los Angeles Aftershock of the ABA in […]
2009 NBA Summer League round-up: Orlando Magic
July 23rd, 2009
– Maurice Ager: The highlight of Maurice Ager’s NBA career was when he cried on draft night after being taken at the very end of the first round. That was touching. Since then…not much. In three years with two teams, Ager has shot 33% from the field, put up more fouls than rebounds, and recorded more turnovers than assists. He’s a scoring specialist, yet he’s never shown the ability to score on an NBA court. He’s never demonstrated NBA three-point range on his jump shot, gets wild in his aggression, and chucks in the few opportunities he gets. You can say, rightly, that he’s never had an extended run in the NBA. Yet he’s also been in it for three years now, seemingly healthy, yet still never seeing rotation time. He wasn’t even good on his D-League assignment. At some point, you’re just not suitable. – Lance Allred: Allred is now 28, but he’s only been on the NBA radar for two years after averaging a double-double with the Idaho Stampede in 2007/08. That landed him a brief stint with the Cavaliers down the stretch of the season, who waived him last October. Allred then returned to the Stampede and averaged 15.6 points and 9.2 rebounds per game last year; more importantly, he took his new found fame and fortune, and wrote a book about his professional basketball career. Longshot: The Adventures of a Deaf Fundamentalist Mormon Kid and His Journey to the NBA is the title of Allred’s book, and it’s available from all good book stores, or by clicking the link there. – Ryan Anderson: Yes, I saw how Anderson did in summer league. Yes, it was very good. Yes, he’s probably a lottery selection had he been drafted in 2009 instead of 2008. Yes, I […]
Where Are They Now, 2009; Part 41
March 1st, 2009
– Olden Polynice has retired, which is perhaps unsurprising given that he’s nearly 45 years old, but it took him longer to do than you might think. After retiring, Polynice became a coach for an ABA team, but the job security of a position like that is about six weeks maximum. He has not, as far as I am aware, joined the police force. – Mark Pope has also retired, and as promised has enrolled in medical school. – Vitaly Potapenko has also also retired. After falling out of the NBA in 2007 (and looking quite bad during his last year), Vitaly sat around on the side-lines for a while before signing with Estudiantes in Spain in December 2007. He played six games, looked off the pace, was quickly waived, and retired after that. End of an era. – Roger Powell hasn’t retired, so that means I’m going to have to actually put some effort into this entry. Powell didn’t make the Bulls roster out of preseason, despite a pretty decent showing, and signed in Israel with Hapoel Jerusalem. In five EuroChallenge games, Powell averaged 8.6 points and 4.6 rebounds, improving slightly to 9.8 points and 4.5 rebounds in the Israeli league. Powell is a combined 10-39 from three-point range in the two competitions, including one 4-4 outing, so his weakness is still his weakness. – Kasib Powell started the year in China, where he averaged 25.8 points, 9.0 rebounds and 3.7 assists on 59% shooting. He left the team at the beginning of the year and is now back in his natural territory – the D-League. For the Sioux Falls Skyforce, Powell is averaging 15.2 points, 3.5 rebounds and 3.2 assists. – Carlos Powell is playing for the pricelessly-named Inchon ET Land Black Slamer in South Korea. He averages […]
Let Me Drago Pasalic You Up And Down
February 4th, 2009
In keeping with my new policy of talking about every game that I watch that isn’t an NBA game, here’s what I observed from last night’s EuroCup game between Iurbentia Bilbao and the home Lithuanian team with a Yorkshire inflection, Lietuvos Rytas. Go. – Bilbao’s line-up features only three Spanish nationals; point guard Javier Salgado, backup guard Paco Vazquez, and a really slow inside player with a massive head and greasy mullet called Salvador Guardia. The rest of the team was made up of foreign players, and it was pretty stacked; former, future and potentially future NBA talent on show included former Bucks forward and avid partygoer Damir Markota, former Jazz and Timberwolves swingman Quincy Lewis, former Heat tryer-outer Luke Recker, former Chicago Bulls summer league participant Drago Pasalic, Mavericks second-rounder Renaldas Seibutis, former Nuggets guard Predrag Savovic, the man the legend known as Frederic Weis (who did not play), Latvian international guard Janis Blums, and Croatian international big man Marko Banic. – Lietuvos, meanwhile, had only two players that weren’t Lithuanian – former South Carolina point forward Chuck Eidson, and Serbian big man Milko Bjelica, whose name sounds more like a lovely pudding. The rest of the team was made out of old clunky Lithuanians. (Eidson was awesome, by the way, and easily the best player in the game, despite all the talent and internationals on the court. But we’ll come to this later.) – For Bucks fans who fancy a cheap laugh at the expense of Damir Markota, I’ve got good news – he was pretty awful. Markota came off the bench in the first half, and did nothing at all, but for some reason he started the second half in place of Pasalic. He then proceeded to get involved on every possession, and normally in a bad […]
