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The NBA Draft is an annual event dating back to 1950 in which the thirty teams from the NBA can draft players who are eligible and wish to join the league.
The 19-year-old hails from a village in Punjab. He is 7 feet 2 inches tall and weighs just above 131 kg. Mavericks had invited India’s biggest basketball hope, Bhamara, for a pre-draft workout on Tuesday. It was the first time that the scouts of the Texas-based team witnessed the skills of the 290-pound Indian center. Since their inaugural 1980–81 season, the Dallas Mavericks have won three division titles (1987, 2007, 2010), two conference championships (2006, 2011), and one NBA Championship (2011).
The Mavericks website says Satnam averaged 4.2 points and 2.7 rebounds in six games at the 2013 FIBA Asia Championships and 9.2 points, 8.4 rebounds and 2.2 blocks for the IMG Academy, a private boarding school in Florida, this season.
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News.com.au on Thursday quoted Bhamara as saying, “A lot of people are texting me every day, ‘When are you going to the NBA?’ And I say, ‘It’s not easy.’ You work hard, then you go play in the NBA. It's not easy for anyone.”
Bhamara also spoke about how Indians were taking to basketball in the country, saying it has developed over the last few years.
For the last five years along with players from 39 countries, Satnam Singh has been training in Florida, the US, on an initiative of USA-based IMG Reliance Academy, reports NDTV.
The Indian Express reports, “Bhamara had been invited for pre-draft workouts to seven different franchises, the Mavericks being the fourth on that list. Yet he found no sign of the team wanting to secure his services when he went to their training centre.” It quoted Bhamara as saying, “There was no real vibe that I got from them when I was there. It was the same as the workouts everywhere else. There were no hints that one team was more interested in me than the other. So for me, I just wanted to get picked, it didn’t matter where. Anywhere would do.”
