TUESDAY, 11:09am: The deal is official, the team announced.
MONDAY, 4:52pm: The Jazz are signing Jack Cooley to a 10-day contract, league sources tell Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). Cooley’s been playing for Utah’s D-League affiliate, and Tony Jones of The Salt Lake Tribune last week identified the big man as a candidate for a 10-day deal. He’s elicited NBA interest on multiple occasions this season, as Gino Pilato of D-League Digest reported. The 23-year-old joins Bryce Cotton, who’s also reportedly set to ink a 10-day contract with the Jazz, and the apparent deal with Cooley is further confirmation that the team’s talks with draft-and-stash prospect Tibor Pleiss have run aground.
Cooley joined the D-League’s Idaho Stampede, Utah’s affiliate, shortly after the Jazz retained his D-League rights upon cutting him from NBA training camp. He’s averaged 15.5 points and 10.6 rebounds in 29.1 minutes per game in his first season of D-League action after having played in Turkey last season. He went undrafted out of Notre Dame in 2013, but he’s remained on NBA radars, having participated in both the Orlando and Las Vegas summer leagues the past two years.
Signing both Cotton and Cooley would give the Jazz a full 15-man roster, though the short-term 10-day arrangements would give the team flexibility while it monitors what goes on with Pleiss. The 10-day deals eat slightly into Utah’s nearly $2.826MM in cap room, but not by much. Since both Cotton and Cooley are NBA rookies, standard 10-day contracts for both wouldn’t cost the team as much as $60K combined.