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Tuesday, October 31, 2000
Bulls have youngest team in history
Associated Press
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NEW YORK -- A player who took the long road from high school
to the pros will begin the season as a starter in New Jersey.
Another player who went from Lubbock, Texas, to Puerto Rico to
Verese, Italy, will begin the season in Phoenix.
Stephen Jackson of the New Jersey Nets and Daniel Santiago of the Suns were two of the success stories Monday as all 29 NBA teams pared their active rosters down to 12 players for the start of the season Tuesday night.
There were 13 games Tuesday, including Philadelphia's win at New York and the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers' triumph at Portland.
The league released the 12-man rosters Monday night, and there
were a few other surprises besides Jackson and Santiago.
The Chicago Bulls will begin the season as the youngest team
in league history with an average age of just less than 23. They have
five rookies on the roster -- Jamal Crawford, Khalid El-Amin, Marcus
Fizer, A.J. Guyton and Dragan Tarlac -- and two more rookies,
Dalibor Bagaric and Jake Voskuhl, on the injured list.
Joe Smith appears on no one's roster. Commissioner David Stern
made the Timberwolves forward a free agent last week, although
Smith's status will remain on hold until an arbitration hearing is
held Thursday on whether Stern overstepped his authority in voiding
Smith's previous two contracts in Minnesota.
Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Tyus Edney have returned to the league,
Abdul-Rauf as the backup point guard in Vancouver and Edney with
the same job in Indiana.
There's a new Marc Jackson in the league, a rookie forward
from Temple who spent the past three years in Turkey and Spain. He
and Adam Keefe will back up starter Danny Fortson in Golden State.
The other Mark Jackson -- that's Mark with a 'k' -- has relocated
from Indiana to Toronto and led the league in assists during the
preseason.
There is no next Michael Jordan. A rookie by that name from
Penn was cut by the Boston Celtics during training camp.
Stephen Jackson took a not-so-direct route from high school to
the pros with no college in between. A high school All-American in
1996, he didn't have the grades to attend Arizona after signing a
letter-of-intent. He enrolled for the spring semester at a
community college in Kansas but did not play, then declared for the
draft in 1997 and was a second-round choice of the Suns.
He was cut during training camp, then made professional stops in
Venezuela and the Dominican Republic before being cut a year ago by the Vancouver Grizzlies.
The Nets gave him a tryout and coach Byron Scott had no idea who
he was on the first day of training camp. But he was the team's
leading scorer for much of the preseason and will begin the season
as a starter in place of the injured Keith Van Horn.
"This is unexpected, very unexpected," Jackson said. "I have
high expectations for myself, but I'm surprised, very surprised."
Santiago, a 7-foot-1 center who played in Italy the past two
seasons and also was a member of the Puerto Rican national team,
will begin the season as the backup center to Chris Dudley.
"What we're going to get is someone who will be more reliable to us than Oliver Miller was last year," Suns general manager Bryan Colangelo said.
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