Canadian Team Presents a Real Test
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I just read a LJW article about our pre-WUGs competition, the Canadian team lineup. WOW!
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Two names most familiar to KU fans would be former Baylor guard Brady Heslip and former ISU forward Melvin Ejim. Two other high profile names are Kyle Wiltjer and Kevin Pangs from Gonzaga. Another name familiar to KU would be Dwight Powell from Stanford.
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I mentioned before that college BBall is full of quality Canadian players; no question they will be very good. However, TTBOMK, the Canadian team has not yet been announced so hard to tell which players will actually play, some players still in college might not get clearance form their schools to play and risk injury, even more so for anyone in the NBA.
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@JayHawkFanToo I don’t see any school who has a player invited to play in this tournament denying them that opportunity. This tournament is providing the players currently in college a month of supervised practice they can’t get if they stay on campus. Also the quality of this tournament is pretty high so not only are players getting a month of practice, they’re also getting some games in against very high quality competition.
The city of Toronto is definitely becoming one of the biggest recruiting hotbeds there is right now. If you made a college team made up exclusively of kids from the Toronto area, it would be a legitimate contender to win a national title.
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@Texas-Hawk-10 some of those guys might be playing nba summer league.
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@Crimsonorblue22 Players with an NBA contract aren’t eligible to play based on the NBA’s rules, and I would guess players invited to Summer League have some sort of contract while playing for a summer league team.
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@Texas-Hawk-10 I’m assuming d league guys would be in the same boat? Heslip was on a d league team.
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@Crimsonorblue22 I don’t know about Heslip specifically, but not all D-League players are under contract with an NBA team. There are plenty of D-League players who are under contract with the D-League team. Naadir Tharpe wasn’t tied to a specific NBA team when he signed with the D-League last season.
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Most players that are under contract and are being paid likely have a clause in their contracts that prevents them from participating in activities that could possibly cause injury. After what happened to Pacer Paul George who was lost for the season while playing for the senior USA team and the team still had to pay his $15M yearly salary, NBA teams now discourage players from playing even for the National Team and Mark Cuban has indicated that no Maverick player will be given permission to play for the USA or any other national team.
I am not sure if D-League contracts are multi-year or only season-long and depending on how they are structured, teams may or may not have the option of preventing players from playing in competition outside the League. Likewise, while college programs have no legal authority to prevent players from playing in competition outside the programs, I would not be surprised if key players are “discouraged” from participating…just an educated guess on my part based on the current trend.
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I think you need to be enrolled in at least one college course as well.
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You are correct. There are several requirements that must be met in order to be eligible.
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@dylans I think they could take basket weaving!
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Do they still have those? I thought they were all replaced with African Studies, self-paced, no attendance required, your-tutor-can-write-your term-paper type courses…
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@JayHawkFanToo You’re thinking of UNC, not Kansas.
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I bet a lot of colleges have similar programs. I always wonder what job exactly do African Studies Programs prepares students for…teach African Studies?
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@JayHawkFanToo I can tell you for a fact that Bill Self sent people to check up on his players to make sure they were in attendance. I can also tell you that Mangino also had people to check on his players from time to time and that I never once saw anyone checking in on the football players while Turner Gill was there in the spring of 2010.
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I was not implying that we have something like this at KU. In fact, the Athletic Department has a program in place that uses volunteers (mostly retired people) that check attendance of every student athlete and if one misses a class, the AD is informed immediately.
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Student managers, hall monitors, student aides – lots of titles have been used at KU to keep track of athletes. The AD maybe informed but the HC knows practically every move a basketball player makes concerning classes, tutoring sessions, workouts, shot arounds, etc. It’s all in the best interests of the program and is IMO absolutely needed to accomplish high expectations.
