“His best thing was just getting to the basket, because he’s kind of tall and long.
His peers saw him as a competent player: “I thought he was decent,” former St John’s player Monique McLean told Bleacher Report in 2017. After hitting two three-pointers against the Newfoundland Growlers, he posted to Instagram that he’d “shattered previous career high.”Īnd what do players and coaches say about Cole’s skills? He played in practice sessions with the women’s team at St John’s to help sharpen their skills. Even Cole seems to have a sense of humor about his single-digit scoring tendencies. Additionally, the CEBL skews young and Cole is much older than most other players on the team. He previously played on Lithuania’s national team). For example, Cole is one of only two players on the Shooting Stars who didn’t play college basketball (guard Sarunas Vasiliakuskas is from Lithuania, where college basketball is less relevant. The data doesn’t provide much supporting evidence for his basketball skills either. Bluntly, Cole is a 37-year-old musician who was a good, but not great, high school player. This is, of course, what a marketing director is supposed to say. “And it seemed like yes, that was the case.” “The big thing was: ‘Can he play? Can he hold up?’” says Sanyal. Sanyal is keen to stress that the marketing benefits were not the primary reason for Cole’s signing. Cole’s presence, not so coincidentally, would allow the CEBL the kind of media attention it wouldn’t have received otherwise, equivalent to millions of dollars in advertising.
Uk basketball roster 2010 professional#
The situation offered Cole a chance to live out his dream of playing professional basketball as a sort of midlife vanity project. It’s reasonable to conclude that Cole’s career in the CEBL was established primarily for non-basketball (ie, marketing) reasons. Eventually, Cole was able to leave novelty basketball behind for professional competition in the CEBL. His alley-oop on a pass from comedian Kevin Hart in the 2012 NBA All-Star celebrity game is one of the best highlights the (often unmemorable) event has ever produced. Basketball, however, always remained in the background.Ĭole’s rap fame eventually allowed him to play in settings where his basketball talent was noticed by the broader public. It was at that point that Cole decided to fully turn his attention toward a career in music. Neither did he make the cut when he tried out for the college team at St John’s University during his freshman year. In a 2013 interview with Sports Illustrated, he said, “I was always in love with basketball as a kid, but I thought I was way better than I really was.” He also admits that, although he did play on his high school team, he wasn’t a star. And yet, even with hip hop’s well-established relationship with basketball, there’s probably never been anyone who better personifies the connection than J Cole.īasketball has been a big part of Cole’s life since childhood. Comedian Dave Chappelle even once humorously observed that it seemed like rapping or playing basketball were the only two ways to make it out of America’s inner cities. Kurtis Blow, widely regarded as rap’s first commercially successful artist, famously announced in the 1980s that basketball was his favorite sport, 90s rap mogul Master P played on the preseason squads for both the Charlotte Hornets and Toronto Raptors, and platinum-selling artist 2 Chainz released a 2010s album called Rap or Go to the League.
Hip-hop and basketball have maintained their ongoing relationship ever since the former first emerged in 1970s New York. Or, more accurately in this context, 6ft 3in Shooting Stars guard Jermaine Cole.
That distinction falls to Grammy-winning rap artist J Cole. Yet, despite his NBA pedigree, Harris is not even the most well-known guard on his team. Harris even once scored 31 points against the Luka Doncic-led Dallas Mavericks. Despite their heartbreaking loss, Scarborough’s season should still be considered a success – the team made it to the championship game in their first year in the league, and the high-scoring duo of Jalen Harris and Kassius Robertson are a dynamic backcourt around which to build.
T he Scarborough Shooting Stars came within a single basket of winning the Canadian Elite Basketball League (CEBL) title on Sunday, losing to the Hamilton Honey Badgers by just two points after a run of 17 unanswered in the fourth quarter.
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