New Faces: Thunder Add Scotty Hopson
With COVID-19 making its way through the NBA , teams across the league are taking on 10-day hardship deal players to fill in the gaps.
The Thunder are the latest team to be hit with a wave of cases, with Tre Mann, Darius Bazley, Aleksej Pokusevski and Jeremiah Robinson-Earl entering health and safety protocols.
With four open spots needing to be filled the Thunder turned in-house to the OKC Blue with hopes of a smooth transition between two teams essentially playing the same system.
Olivier Sarr, Zavier Simpson and Rob Edwards are all 24 or younger hoping to parlay this opportunity into jump starting their NBA careers. It’s the Thunder’s fourth signing, 32-year-old Scotty Hopson, that is the most interesting addition of the group.
Hopson, a 6-foot-7 wing, played three years at Tennessee, averaging 17 points and 3.3 rebounds on 45.2% shooting his senior year before going undrafted in the 2011 draft.
In the following three seasons Hopson made his way across the world with stints in Greece, Israel and Turkey. The highlight of his foreign stint came in 33 games with Hapoel Eilat of the Isreali Basketball League where he averaged 17.7 points and 5.2 rebounds.
The Cleveland Cavaliers saw enough from Hopson’s trip abroad to sign him to a deal in 2014, but only managed seven minutes across two games — spending the majority of his time in the G League.
His time with Cleveland didn’t last long as he was shipped out in July of the same year kickstarting a two-month period in which he was dealt four times.
At 25-years-old and having just been waived following the slew of trades, Hopson went back abroad. In the next eight year he made stops in Australia, Israel, Turkey, China, the G League, Spain, and Croatia with an 8-minute appearance for the Dallas Mavericks coming as his only sniff of the NBA in the stretch.
Hopson has spent parts of three of the last four G League seasons with the Blue, averaging 6.4 points in 11 games this season.
He impressed during the Blue’s G League Showcase run earlier this month averaging 13.5 points in two games including a game-winner to send the Blue to the final.
Now, at 32, Hopson is back in the league he has spent more than a decade trying to get a shot at.
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