Undrafted Kansas State Wildcats point guard Jacob Pullen signs a deal with Italian team: NBA Update
The 21 year old Jacob Pullen of the Kansas State Wildcats has inked a deal with Italian team Pallacanestro Biella for a series. The series will take place in the foothills of the Alps, an area with roughly 50,000 strong population.
Pallacanestro Biella is an Italian basketball club, which is also known as Angelico Biella when it competes in the domestic contests and Lauretana Biella in Europe, because of sponsorship reasons.
This deal is really an astonishing achievement for a player like Pullen, who didn’t get selected by any team in the 2011 draft, in spite of his impressive statistics. He is Kansas State’s all-time leading scorer with 2,132 points
and also fourth-highest point total in the history of Big 12.
When it comes to skills and talent, Pullen is no short of it and his previous three seasons with the Wildcats are the proof of it. In the 2010-11 season, Pullen scored at an average of 20.2 points per game on a 0.426 percent shooting
from the field and 0.773 percent from the charity stripe. In the 2009-10 season, his scoring average was 19.3 points and in 2008-09 it was 13.9 points per game.
He is an excellent perimeter shooter and can get to the free throw line at will. He is also a very good option on defense and can prove an asset on the back court. Despite all of that talent, Pullen failed to make it to the NBA
this year. And then because of the lockout, Summer Leagues in Orlando and Los Vegas were annulled. However, this Italian stint will provide him good exposure in the preseason training camp.
If these camps would have taken place then Pullen might have got some sort of assurity or guarantee that lifted players like him in the past. Recent examples are John Lucas III, who received partial guarantee last summer from the
Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Clippers gave it to Marquis Blakely and Patrick Ewing Jr. got it from the New York Knicks, when they all went undrafted. Through these types of guarantees a player can earn a decent amount of money that ranges from $50,000 to $150,000.
Although at this point annulment of the summer league seems of no importance, but if the lockout gets settle before the start of the next season, it would be difficult to find backups like Pullen, as then they would engaged with
international clubs around the world.
Tags: