It’s true that championship-winning players like Bruce Bowen and Danny Green got their start with the San Antonio Spurs by signing a 10-day contract. What’s also true, though, is that most 10-day contracts end before you’ve even noticed — as was the case with J.J. O’Brien, who coasted in and out of the Utah locker room earlier this month.
Regardless: nobody ever gets signed to even a 10-day deal unless the NBA club can envision a way to grow with the player in the long term. This was the case when Utah signed Elijah Millsap to a 10-day deal last season — it was only a year later, when Millsap’s offensive game still showed no signs of improving, that the team and player parted ways.
The Jazz have signed point guard Erick Green to a 10-day deal, a move that’s especially notable because Green was the very player whom Utah traded to the Denver Nuggets in exchange for the draft rights to Rudy Gobert. Seeing as the Nuggets cut Green after just three games played at the beginning of the season, it’s very obvious which player you’d keep on your team if faced with the choice — but the point remains that Utah had Green on their radar for some time.
What’s interesting about Green, who finds himself in such a precarious and impermanent moment in his career, is that his primary gift on the basketball court is to score, and often. (One suspects that he just might have had a far easier path into the league if he were born in a previous era.)
Green’s development may well have gotten lost in the shuffle as a rookie on last year’s Denver Nuggets team, an uninspiring squad that went with an interim for the last third of the season after firing coach Brian Shaw. Green shot 29.8 percent on three-pointers with the Nuggets — which is in line with the 30.0 percent he shot while playing in Italy in 2013-14. However, he was shooting 38.9 percent on three-point shots as a senior at Virginia Tech, on a team where he was the primary ball handler.
Things changed dramatically when Green got to the Reno Bighorns in the D-League this season. In 23 games in Reno, he took a three-point shot about once every six minutes, and he sunk an incredible 48.1 percent of those shots. He averaged 26.7 points per game with the Bighorns, including nights like this 40-point performance:
Green is due for a huge stylistic shock, though: the Bighorns are the fastest team in the D-League at 102.5 possessions per game, while the Jazz are easily the slowest team in the NBA at 90.7 possessions per game. This means his total scoring numbers are naturally going to die down. But because he’s so crafty in the half court, maintaining his per-shot efficiency will be his focus.
Green received a few late minutes in Utah’s blowout of the Charlotte Hornets, and he got his Jazz tenure off to a good start with an assist and two made buckets on two shots. First he exploited the Hornets defender sagging way too far back in the pick-and-roll:
And then he unleashed his own improvisation with the shot clock winding down:
With so many defense-first players on their roster, Utah’s second units have definitely struggled to make and take their own shots. Even though Green is below average on defense, the fit for this score-first player is a good one.
-
Ross Jamal Pusey