Johan Petro landed a three-year, $10MM deal from the rebuilding Nets following the 2010 season but the big man never found his place on either side of the floor. After being shipped to the Hawks in the Joe Johnson deal last year, Petro hit the open market in the summer and apparently didn’t find an NBA deal to his liking. Yesterday, the 27-year-old Frenchman reached agreement with a Chinese team on a deal that somewhat surprisingly doesn’t include an NBA-opt out clause. Here’s more out of the Atlantic..
- Joel Brigham of HoopsWorld runs down the clubs that could potentially be 2014’s new playoff teams, including the Raptors. Toronto was only four games out of the Eastern Conference playoff picture last year and they’ll now have Rudy Gay for a full season with Masai Ujiri at the helm in the front office.
- Chris Forsberg of ESPNBoston.com has another installment of his summer forecast series on the Celtics and this time the focus is on who the club’s biggest underachiever might be. Forsberg compiled votes from C’s bloggers who gave him a whopping 12 potential underachievers. The leading votegetter was Jeff Green, but newcomer MarShon Brooks was also among those receiving significant votes.
- While the Raptors have been known to carry several international players in years past, Doug Smith of the Toronto Star says that it wasn’t a coordinated effort to rope in foreign-born fans.