Joe Alexander Rumors
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Joe Alexander
Position: -
Born: 12/26/86
Height: 6-8 / 2.03
Weight:229 lbs. / 104.3 kg.
Earnings: $5,076,945 ($6,926,119*)
Born: 12/26/86
Height: 6-8 / 2.03
Weight:229 lbs. / 104.3 kg.
Earnings: $5,076,945 ($6,926,119*)
Bobby Marks: Last four games for Jalen Smith in Phoenix: – 16 PPG – 10.5 RPG Because his 3rd year team option was declined, the most that Phoenix or an acquiring team can sign him for is $4.67M. The first top 10 pick not to have his 3rd year option exercised since Joe Alexander (2009).
Regardless of his success overseas, Alexander isn’t holding out hope for a return to the states. “I don’t think that a 33-year-old in my position can come back and play in the NBA,” Alexander said. “I mean, I know my game is better suited for American-style basketball, but it’s just not realistic to think that I can make the leap. It’s just not realistic at this point.”
According to his agent David Pick, on Aug. 13, Alexander signed the most-lucrative free-agent contract in Israel outside of Maccabi Tel Aviv with Ironi Nahariya, making him the second-highest-paid naturalized Israeli player in the entire Israeli Basketball League. “It’s obvious that they have a lot invested in me; that’s the part that’s good for me. I don’t like to go places where I feel undervalued, to begin with,” Alexander told BasketballNews.com in a phone interview. “That was a mistake I made early in my career, thinking you could go places that don’t really want you and work your way through the lineup throughout the course of 10 months, 12 months. I prefer to go to places where they demonstrate upfront that they’re serious about me.”
“[We] want to play in the NBA ’cause it’s the life — you’re rich, you’re famous, you’re an athlete, you play a game that you tremendously enjoy, people idolize you, you get to play with your idols, you’re free from the doldrums of other jobs that you can’t see yourself being anything but miserable in. So in all of those criteria, European basketball is exactly that. It’s like the things that you dream about as a kid, thinking only the NBA can provide that. It’s not true. European basketball is exactly that.”
“People didn’t realize that about me, and I don’t think anybody understood where I came from as a basketball player,” Alexander said. “I grew up in China; I didn’t play organized five-on-five until I was, like, 16 years old. I didn’t know what a pick-and-roll was until I was a sophomore in college. The only reason that I was ever on a team, on a court, in an NBA workout was ’cause I was the best one-on-one player in the world. So when pre-draft workouts came and they put us in one-on-one settings, nobody could believe what they were seeing. In fact, if I would’ve been allowed to work out with the other lottery picks — ’cause they’d sit out at the workouts — I would’ve gone No. 1 (in the draft). Everybody that I worked out with, I ended up getting drafted higher than them.
