Jarrett Culver Rumors
All NBA Players
Position: G
Born: 02/20/99
Height: 6-5 / 1.96
Weight:195 lbs. / 88.5 kg.
Salary: $5,813,640
Born: 02/20/99
Height: 6-5 / 1.96
Weight:195 lbs. / 88.5 kg.
Salary: $5,813,640
The Suns traded the former Red Raider during the draft to the Timberwolves, making him teammates with Timberwolves’ stars Karl Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins. “It’s been great interacting with (Towns and Wiggins),” Culver said. “They’re great people, great players, so I’m just making sure I learn from them. They’ve been there, they’ve been to that level, so making sure I learn everything I can. It’s going to be a great season.”
With new teammates, Culver said he is connecting with the team before the season as the Timberwolves took a team trip to the Bahamas but since every player has a different schedule, it can be hard to get everyone in one place. “They’re great players,” Culver said regarding the teammates he is surrounded by in Minnesota. “When you have great players on the court, it helps you out a lot. Just like in college I had a lot of great players around me, in the NBA I have a lot of great players so I’m excited about it.”
Looking back, he blames his under-the-radar status in part on location—“Not a lot of people got out to Lubbock to see what I could do”—and also on his relative late-bloomer status; unlike some other prominent members of the 2019 lottery class, Culver wasn’t an Instagram highlight star at 14 or 15. But Texas Tech coach Chris Beard saw plenty to offer the hometown kid a scholarship, and after a slow-building freshman campaign in 2017-18—in which he started most of the second half of the season—Beard’s faith was more than justified last year.
“Going into my sophomore year, when all the preseason rankings and awards came out, I wasn’t in a lot of them, and that kind of drove me,” he says. The payoff: 18.5 points, 6.4 rebounds, 3.7 assists, and a rep as one of the best defenders in the nation en route to being named Big 12 Conference Player of the Year. He says he didn’t really expect the award, but he also wasn’t surprised. “It’s something that I worked toward, to be one of the best players in the conference, so at the end of the day I would say I expected it, just because of how hard I worked.”
Kyle Ratke: Jarrett Culver: “You see what they’re building … I’m trying to win just as bad as these coaches and everyone else.”
