It appears that former Kings small forward Tyler Honeycutt will have a chance to make the Jazz next season, according to David Pick of Eurobasket.com (Twitter link). Pick says the 23-year-old will audition for Utah during training camp, but since it would be highly unusual for NBA teams to make training camp invitations at this time of year, it seems more likely that he’ll work out for the club in a summer mini-camp setting. That was the context of Honeycutt’s last brush with the NBA, when he was part of a Bucks mini-camp nearly a year ago.
The 35th overall pick in the 2011 NBA draft spent this past season playing with Ironi Nes-Ziona in Israel. Honeycutt averaged 15.6 points and 9.1 rebounds in 34.4 minutes per contest and made the Israeli All-Star Game this year, a season removed from his brief NBA tenure. He played 15 games as a rookie for the Kings and just nine games in his sophomore campaign before Sacramento shipped him to Houston in the Thomas Robinson trade. He never appeared in a game for the Rockets before they waived him to make room for Aaron Brooks a couple of weeks after the swap.
The 6’8″ Honeycutt’s rebounding prowess overseas mimics his work on the boards at UCLA, where he averaged 7.2 RPG in 35.0 MPG during his final season as a Bruin. He grabbed 5.6 RPG in just 19.7 MPG in 25 D-League games, mostly while on assignment from the Kings and Rockets, but he didn’t get much of a chance to show what he could do in the NBA, playing a grand total of 120 minutes.