TUESDAY, 10:16am: Representatives from Enel Brindisi deny that they’re moving toward a deal with Hopson, Carchia tweets.
MONDAY, 11:39am: Scotty Hopson is finalizing a deal with Italy’s Enel Brindisi, sources tell Sportando’s Emiliano Carchia. Hopson is still under contract with the Kings, who officially acquired him in the Jason Terry trade last week, but it seems unlikely that Sacramento would carry his non-guaranteed salary of nearly $1.451MM into the season. Italian outlets Mismatchbrindisi and La Gazzetta dello Sport were the first to report the talks, according to Carchia, who provided a translation of the original dispatches.
Hopson was averaging 10.9 points in 24.9 minutes per game for Turkey’s Anadolu Efes last season when Cleveland signed him at the end of March to a deal that covered the rest of the season, with non-guaranteed salary included for 2014/15. The Cavs used their room exception to make the deal more lucrative and thus more valuable for matching salaries in a trade, though they could have created a more valuable trade chip and saved money at the same if they’d signed a 10-plus-year veteran to a minimum-salary deal. Still, Hopson played out the season and Cleveland indeed shipped him out, sending him to Charlotte, which flipped him to New Orleans less than 48 hours later. The Pelicans sent him along to Houston in the Omer Asik trade less than 48 hours after that, and the Rockets held on to him for two months so they could aggregate his salary with Alonzo Gee‘s in the Terry swap.
A deal overseas would presumably give Hopson some degree of certainty about where he’ll play the coming season after a whirlwind summer, though it’s unclear whether it would contain an NBA escape clause. The 25-year-old swingman saw action in only two games for less than seven minutes combined during his stint with the Cavs, so he didn’t have much of a chance to prove his worth in the Association.