I just started adding athletes as friends on Facebook, guys who had jerseys on, and I tried to convince them to sign with me, even though I wasn’t an agent.
STEFAN BONDY/NY DAILY NEWS leagues or the D-League.
The super agencies still control most of the money in the NBA and often win their battles, starting with CAA, Excel and Wasserman.
“It’s super intimidating. We’re recruiting kids since they were freshmen, then these big agents come in last-second and they swoop them up,” Hazan said. “They invest two weeks into recruiting a kid and we invest four years and we don’t get the kid. It’s tough. It’s super challenging. It’s frustrating. Like, ‘How do we succeed in this business? What is it that puts you over the edge?’ It’s tough. But you have to find your niche. We don’t need to be the No. 1 agency right now but we need to have our niche and be good at our niche, get the guys who are at the lower totem pole in the big agencies and help them out. And you look at our client list, you’ll see that. A lot of the guys are signing with us after leaving Wasserman, after leaving CAA. And that’s how we hope to grow.”
Artis, an All-ACC forward from the University of Pittsburgh, represented Hazan’s first client invited to the combine. The 24-year-old went undrafted but impressed in Summer League and signed a training camp deal with the Knicks.
“With me, it’s not about the age of the agent, not about how many people you are representing. None of that. I wanted to give them a shot,” Artis said. “They were all focused on me. They were all about Jamel Artis getting in the right position. For me, that was very key. I wanted to be the focus. I didn’t want a guy who had 10 guys he has to worry about. Daniel has other guys he has to worry about, but I’m his primary focus.” rtis now has a chance to make the Knicks’ roster or, more likely, secure a two-way contract, meaning he’d mostly play with the Knicks’ D-League squad in Westchester. For Hazan and Hoenig — lifelong Knicks fans — it’s a potential step toward realizing their lofty goals.
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