– Brad Stricker Stricker played his first two college years with Texas A&M back in 1995-97. He averaged 4.4 points and 2.5 rebounds before transferring to Arizona State, but had sat only one semester of his required three at ASU before transferring again, this time to Georgia State. There, in the 1998-99 season, Stricker averaged 3.9 points and 3.9 rebounds, before leaving with a year of eligibility left to go and join the real world. Stricker started a construction company, Stricker Construction, and made a couple of returns to basketball. Although one of them is hard to verify. His CV says that he played briefly in the SWBL in 2001, winning the championship that year with the San Antonio Bombers; however, a Google search for “SWBL basketball” reveals the only such league in existence to be the Strathcona Women’s Basketball League, and a search for “San Antonio Bombers” reveals only this. After that, Stricker played the 2001-02 season in Mexico, where he averaged 18 points, 12 rebounds, 4 blocks and 3 assists per game for Correcaminos Matamoros in the LNBP. But Stricker did not play for the next three years in order to run the construction company. In 2005, having sold the business, Stricker attended offseason workouts with the Denver Nuggets and the San Antonio Spurs. Teams frequently let players work out with them during the summer, and Stricker worked out with Denver again in 2006. He signed with the Great Falls Explorers of the CBA in November 2006, but did not seem to appear in any games. (I tried to find out, but the Explorer’s website is now pornography.) And then in 2007, after a third summer of working out with the Nuggets, Stricker signed a training camp deal with the team. The chances of Stricker making the team […]
– Alfred Aboya: In accordance with Murphy’s prophecy, we start with the one guy that I’ve not much on. There’s nothing wrong with that, though, since it means we get to learn. Aboya is a 6’9 big man who just finished his senior season at UCLA, a team that seems to have lost its entire roster over the last three weeks. He averaged 9.9 points and 6.3 rebounds last season, and, when I finally get around to those UCLA games that I keep promising to watch, I’ll be able to fashion a more formulated if still largely ignorant opinion of him. – Rodrigue Beaubois: Beaubois was the Maverick’s first-round draft choice this past summer, when they traded the rights to B.J. Mullens for him. (I’m only upset that I missed out on a “Mark Cuban turned down a B.J.” joke, despite the predictability of it all.) He averaged 10.0 points, 2.5 rebounds and 2.3 assists in the French league last season, which isn’t particularly stand-out from a 6’2 guard in a weak standard of competition. Yet I read somewhere that they’re bringing him over immediately anyway, because there’s some potential in his burst. – Andre Brown: Andre Brown keeps getting NBA contracts without getting NBA run. He has shown some decent offensive talent in the minor leagues – that is, if you’re willing to excuse his Shaq-like foul shooting – yet while spot minutes in 75 NBA games over three years might not be the biggest sample size, he has not yet shown yourself to be an offensive player at the NBA level, and survived in the big leagues largely as a rebounder. Now 28 and neither a shooter nor a shot-blocker, Brown is back for yet another summer league – Dallas could use a power forward, so […]
