Erick Green almost missed his NBA call-up by screening his calls
Yahoo Sports NBA reporter Shams Charania broke the news Tuesday that the Utah Jazz had signed guard Erick Green from the D-League’s Reno Bighorns to a 10-day contract. It’s a move aimed at adding a healthy body to a Jazz backcourt beset by injuries to point guards Dante Exum (lost for the season to a torn ACL) and Raul Neto (who suffered a concussion on Monday) and shooting guard Alec Burks (who broke his fibula in December). It’s also a move that almost didn’t happen, because Green doesn’t play on the phone.
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We’ll let the 24-year-old Virginia Tech product, who had averaged 26.7 points, 4.4 assists and 4.3 rebounds per game in 22 appearances for the Bighorns this season, explain it himself:
“I didn’t answer the phone for the first two calls because I don’t answer the phone if I don’t know your number. That’s just how I always am. I didn’t answer it. My agent called me. He was like: ‘Answer your phone. Utah is calling.’ So I answered it real fast then. I picked up the phone. They told me they were excited to have me. I couldn’t even sleep last night … Just so excited to be here.”
The prospect of Green missing out on another crack at an NBA job for not picking up his phone sounds crazy … until you remember that Sundiata Gaines once got an NBA job because he had a passport, and that Sean Kilpatrick once got an NBA job because he was within driving distance of the arena. Sometimes, when you’re on the margins of NBA life, luck matters.
That said, I deeply relate to Green’s approach here. Every time my cell phone rings with an unstored number, I try to quickly search the number online to see if I can figure out who’s calling. Sometimes, I find out that it’s FedEx, trying to deliver something to my new apartment. Sometimes, I find out that it is a number that has apparently attempted to scam like half of America. Sometimes, I find out nothing, and let it go to voice mail, only it’s 2016, and hardly anybody ever leaves voice mails anymore, which I guess means it’s entirely possible that the Utah Jazz have been trying to sign me as an emergency point guard for a few years now, only I’ve never picked up. No wonder the rebuild’s taking so long.
SB Nation’s Seth Rosenthal sees Green’s story as a cautionary tale for those, like me, who screen unfamiliar numbers, and implores us to change our shortsighted ways:
Ninety-eight times out of 100, it’s a telemarketer or a misdial. One time out of 100, it’s the cops or the IRS. That other one time out of 100, it is a prospective employer or someone using you as an emergency contact or someone who got your number secondhand or your friend who’s borrowing a stranger’s phone because theirs ran out of battery or any number of perfectly legitimate and perhaps important parties whose contact information you did not already have. It’s worth those annoying 98 times out of 100 (and even that other 1 out of 100) to not hit “ignore” on some life-changing correspondence. Pick up your phone. Please.
Whether Green’s eventual pick-up winds up changing his life remains to be seen, but it does represent the conclusion of a several-years-delayed missed connection: the Jazz selected green with the 46th overall pick in the 2013 NBA draft, but traded him to the Denver Nuggets along with cash considerations in exchange for the rights to a French center named Rudy Gobert.
That deal, as we know, worked out pretty well for the Jazz. Gobert developed into one of the league’s premier defensive big man, while Green spent his rookie season playing in Italy before returning and struggling to make an impact on the Nuggets while trying to become more of a “pure” point guard than he’d been at Virginia Tech, where he led Division I in scoring as a senior. Green averaged just over nine minutes per game in 46 appearances over the course of two seasons before Denver waived him back in November.
Now, after working hard to sharpen his shooting stroke in the D-League — he shot 53.3 percent from the field and a scorching 48.1 percent on nearly seven 3-point attempts per game for Reno this season — the 6-foot-4 guard returns to Salt Lake City to back up Trey Burke, get a chance to play with the 7-footer for whom he was traded, and hopefully show enough to stick around after this first 10-day pact lapses. From Aaron Falk of the Salt Lake Tribune:
On Tuesday morning, Green went through his first practice with the Jazz, going over film, walking through sets, trying to learn a new system — and getting to know his new teammates, Gobert included.
“He’s a great player,” Green said of his new teammate. “He’s been [having] a heck of a year. I’m just excited to be here with the Utah Jazz, excited to be with the team and I’m excited to see how things go.”
Here’s hoping that when Green drains his first triple in a Jazz uniform, he takes a page out of Devin Booker’s, um, book and busts out a little “Hotline Bling.” It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate marriage of celebration and circumstance.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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