Pistons point guard Brandon Jennings admits basketball wasn’t his primary focus during the first four years of his career, but the free agent process this summer jolted him out of complacency, as he tells Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports.
“I just wanted a new start,” Jennings said. “Seeing a bunch of my teammates leave, Monta (Ellis), J.J. (Redick), Mike Dunleavy, everybody, the coaching staff I’d been around for four years, everything was different. I felt like they were going in a different direction and I felt like I had do the same.”
Jennings considered signing his one-year qualifying offer from the Bucks to get to unrestricted free agency in 2014, but Milwaukee’s hiring of an unfamiliar coach in Larry Drew dissuaded him from that idea, Jennings says. Still, at least one beat writer doesn’t see him as Detroit’s point guard of the future, as we detail in our league-wide roundup:
- MLive’s David Mayo answers reader questions and expresses confidence that the Celtics will continue to make Rajon Rondo available, and that Pistons president of basketball ops Joe Dumars will keep trying to trade for the All-Star point guard.
- Iman Shumpert didn’t answer a question Thursday about whether he wants to stay in New York, as Ian Begley of ESPNNewYork.com notes. Marc Berman of the New York Post suggests some possible landing spots for the Knicks swingman.
- Wherever Shumpert lands, it probably won’t be in Minnesota, since the Wolves aren’t in on any of the trade talks involving him, tweets Darren Wolfson of ESPN 1500 Twin Cities.
- Andre Iguodala started thinking about joining the Warriors even as he and his Nuggets teammates were facing Golden State in the playoffs last season, HoopsWorld’s Alex Kennedy writes. Iguodala fits the needs of the W’s even more than Dwight Howard would have, posits Marcus Thompson II of the Bay Area News Group.
- Nets GM Billy King is optimistic about his team and coach Jason Kidd in spite of Brooklyn’s slow start, as he reveals in a Q&A with USA Today’s Sam Amick.
Who else would Knicks have to give up in order to trade Shumpert for Rondo?