From Cali to Israeli…
High school senior, Jeremy Tyler, is skipping his senior year at San Diego High School, CA to play professional basketball overseas in Israel. On Tuesday, Maccabi Haifa of the Israeli Premiere League signed Tyler to a one-year contract worth $150,000. He is the first player to skip his senior year to play professional ball abroad. Last year, Brandon Jennings made the leap from high school to the pros and played for Lottomatica Roma of the Italian Lega A. Jennings was recently selected with the tenth pick in the 2009 NBA Draft by the Milwaukee Bucks, which shows playing overseas can pay off both immediately and down the road. Tyler originally chose to play college basketball for Rick Pitino at Louisville.
With the help of the international basketball guru, Sonny Vaccaro, Tyler felt that this was the smart decision. He will have one more year after this season before he can play in the NBA, which should prove interesting. Everybody knew that Jennings would bolt from the international leagues to the NBA after one season, but where will the 6-foot-11 monster forward play next year? Will he opt to stay in Israel? Will he try to jump to Spain, arguably the best league outside of the NBA? Will a team like the Greek powerhouse Olympiacos Piraeus sign him to an extremely lucrative deal? Who knows, but I look forward to watching him play overseas and see how everything pans out.
While the NBA made the rule change that players had to be one year removed from high school before they could enter the NBA Draft, I don’t think they envisioned the jump to Europe. The economy might be hurting some of the international teams like the NBA teams, but there is always a market for players like Jeremy Tyler. According to NBADraft.net, Tyler is expected to be a top-5 pick in 2011.
The Maccabi Haifa add Tyler to an already loaded roster who lost in the League Finals last year to Maccabi Electra Tel-Aviv (they are led by former USC Trojan and international veteran, David Bluthenthal) . The Maccabi Haifa have a different former USC Trojan in Davon Jefferson. Jefferson is most remembered (at least by me) for stupidly declaring for the NBA Draft a year too early and immediately signing an agent before “testing the waters” at the NBA pre-Draft camps. He would go on to be undrafted, which started his life bouncing around overseas. On a positive note, Jefferson can jump out of the gym and these games are sure to be packed.
Tyler averaged 28.7 points per game his junior year at San Diego High, while leading his team to the CIF-San Diego Section Division I quarterfinals.
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