Former Arizona Wildcat Azuolas Tubelis took a big chance coming to Tucson, and it paid off as he prepares for the next step in his basketball career.
Bruce Pascoe The easy way for Azuolas Tubelis to prepare for the NBA Draft and a professional basketball career wasn't routed through Arizona.
No. The 6-foot-10 forward could have just stayed in his native, basketball-mad Lithuania, where he was identified as an elite prospect early in his teenage years, and kept developing with the national team's program and his local club, the Rytas of Vilnius.“I realized that I’m good when I was 14-15 years old because I was playing with a group 2001 born,” Tubelis said. “I had all those stats with one-year-older guys and I got some recognition. I'm like, 'OK, I'm good.
You won’t find Tubelis on many of the major mock NBA Drafts, though. ESPN has him rated the 61st-best player available for the 58-player draft, and the Athletic puts him at No. 65. But Yahoo has him going to the Brooklyn Nets at No. 51, Sports Illustrated projects him going with the second-to-last pick while NBADraft.net projects he’ll be the very last player taken.
All those opportunities might not be as present if Tubelis was buried in the European basketball ecosphere, unable to play often before NBA scouts and unable to experience the speed of the American game. As a sophomore in 2021-22, Tubelis said of that freshman season that he had a lot of bad days in practice after which he “came to my dorm really, sad, angry. I kept saying, ‘I don’t want to play this game. Why am I here?’”
Then he went back home to Lithuania, and just 50 seconds into his first game in the FIBA U19 World Cup, blocked a shot from UA teammate Bennedict Mathurin of Canada, who became one of the NBA’s top rookies last season.But before Tubelis’ sophomore year began, Lloyd let him know things would still not be easy.
But Lloyd still occasionally pulled Tubelis out of key moments for defensive reasons, and the question of what sort of player he can defend in the NBA is one reason he’s not considered a certain draft pick, along with the limited offensive range he showed in college.
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