11:59am: The deal is official, the Pacers have announced. It’s a minimum salary contract, since it couldn’t otherwise become official during the July moratorium. He suffered his injury, a broken left fibula, in early May, according to the release. That explains why there were no reports of him having gone through predraft auditions for clubs.
11:30am: The Pacers will sign Western Michigan power forward Shayne Whittington to a one-year, partially guaranteed contract, reports Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). That’s in spite of a knee injury that will force Whittington to miss the first half of the season, as Wojnarowski also tweets.
Whittington went undrafted after putting up 16.1 points and 8.9 rebounds per game as a senior this past season. The client of Ronald Shade and Herb Rudoy didn’t appear to garner much attention on the predraft workout circuit, but he did impress in the Portsmouth Invitation Tournament, according to Wojnarowski.
Indiana has struck deals with a pair of power forwards today, reeling in Spanish league sharpshooter Damjan Rudez in addition to Whittington. Still, both are untested commodities against NBA competition, and the team has no plans to waive the partially guaranteed contract of Luis Scola, as Candace Buckner of the Indianapolis Star reported earlier.
Huh? Don’t understand this. Not a player who was getting any buzz, I am surprised that they had to give him a partial guarantee