WISE ROOKIE
Los Angeles Clippers guard Milos Teodosic will make his NBA debut this season at age 30,
There will be all kinds of chatter about Lonzo Ball and far, far, far too much about his father.
Ben Simmons will be an intriguing player to watch and the No. 1 pick in last June’s draft, Markelle Fultz, gives the Philadelphia 76ers two first-year players worth keeping an eye on.
There’s already been lots of love for Dennis Smith in Dallas, and Josh Jackson in Phoenix and Jason Tatum in Boston are also in the conversation about solid first-year NBA players.
But to league insiders, there’s a guy with the Los Angeles Clippers, a 30year-old with a well-established basketball pedigree, who is going to be the NBA rookie fans are going to want to watch.
Milos Teodosic, a Serbian who has been dominant in the upper echelons of European basketball for a year, might turn more heads than any other rookie.
“He’s as good a passer as I’ve ever seen,” Clippers coach Doc Rivers said this week when Teodosic made his NBA debut. “His instincts are fun to watch.”
That’s no faint praise from Rivers, who’s seen more than his fair share of talented point guards come and go. But as if to prove his coach right, Teodosic had a handful of eye-popping plays in two games against the Toronto Raptors to show that perhaps Rivers wasn’t just going all hyperbole on his new player. He made a one-handed, underhanded, length-of-the-court pass in Tuesday’s game that had people running to computers and phones for video proof of what they’d just seen. In the Sunday game, he made a nolook wraparound pass in traffic for an easy basket that most guards wouldn’t have seen, let alone tried.
The Serbia native starred for years with Olympiacos in Greece and CSKA Moscow before agreeing to a two-year, $12.3-million (U.S.) con- tract with the Clippers. He led Serbia to the silver medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics and the silver at the 2014 FIBA World Cup and was generally considered the best guard in the world not in the NBA before he signed in Los Angeles.
“I decided a long time ago that I wanted to play in the NBA, but I didn’t have that (many) chances because I was always under contract and I was not a free agent,” he told reporters after his first game with Los Angeles. “This summer, I was free and the first big opportunity was here with the Clippers.”
It’s not like Teodosic will be able to ease himself into the NBA. He’ll be asked to at least try to replace perennial all-star Chris Paul on a team that some think could be a Western Conference finalist. Playing alongside Blake Griffin, DeAndre Jordan, Danilo Gallinari and a handful of Clipper vets puts Teodosic squarely in the crosshairs.
“I guess he can be a 30-year-old rookie of the year, that’s possible. I didn’t think about that until right now,” Rivers joked this week.
“I guess he can be a 30-year-old rookie of the year, that’s possible. I didn’t think about that until right now.” DOC RIVERS LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS COACH