Free agent guard Facundo Campazzo, who spent the last two seasons in Denver and the early part of 2022/23 in Dallas, appears set to resume his career in the EuroLeague, but his destination has yet to be determined.
According to Aris Barkas of Eurohoops.net, Serbian club Crvena Zvezda has offered Campazzo a two-year contract worth 1.8 million Euros this season and 2.5 million Euros for 2023/24, with a third-year player option. The team also intends to cover a significant chunk of the remaining money Campazzo still owes to Real Madrid as part of the 2020 buyout agreement that allowed him to go to the NBA, says Barkas.
However, since Real Madrid still holds Campazzo’s EuroLeague rights, the Spanish club will have 10 days to decide whether or not to match the offer, per Barkas. That clock began on Tuesday.
Here are a few more odds and ends from around the basketball world:
- The NBA announced on Tuesday that the Maurice Podoloff Trophy, named after the league’s first commissioner, will now be awarded to the team that finishes each regular season with the best record. As Tim Reynolds of The Associated Press observes, the Maurice Podoloff Trophy was previously awarded to the NBA’s annual Most Valuable Player up until 2021, but has since been revamped and repurposed.
- The NBA has loosened the rules related to the scouting of high school prospects, reports Jonathan Givony of ESPN. Teams will now be permitted to attend a handful of important high school basketball events, despite the fact that the participants will be at least a year away from draft eligibility. There are no immediate plans to remove the one-and-done rule for draft prospects in the near future, Givony adds, so for the time being this change is simply about giving teams a head-start on evaluating top prospects before they enter college.
- Providing an update on the NBA’s labor talks, Marc Stein writes in his latest Substack article that he believes the league and the players’ union will likely agree to push back the December 15 opt-out deadline so that they can amicably continue their negotiations. Interestingly, Stein also says the NBA’s push for an “upper spending limit,” first reported in October, appears to be more serious than it has been in the past — in previous negotiations, the NBA dropped that request to gain other concessions, but the league is pursuing the de facto hard cap more “vigorously” this time around, according to Stein.