Kyle Guy is headed overseas, with the news last week that the UVA hoops alum has signed a one-year deal with Club Joventut Badalona in the Liga ACB.
Terms of the deal with the Spanish club were not disclosed. Salaries in Liga ACB typically pay out in the range of $200,000 to $500,000 per year.
Guy’s career hasn’t taken off the way some assumed it would since he helped lead Virginia to the 2019 national championship.
Guy, along with teammates De’Andre Hunter and Ty Jerome, all bolted for the NBA Draft that spring, though Guy’s prospects were questionable, since the mock drafts had Guy, an undersized shooting guard, going at best late in the second round, if his name would be called at all.
Hunter and Jerome each went in the first round, as expected, and Guy fell all the way to the 55th pick, landing in Sacramento, where he only got into three games in the 2019-2020 season, spending the bulk of his rookie campaign in the G League.
That would become a theme. Guy has torn up the G League over the past three seasons, averaging 20.9 points per game, shooting 42.4 percent from the floor and 37.5 percent from three.
His NBA numbers, unfortunately, are quite pedestrian: 3.1 points and 8.1 minutes per game in 53 games with the Kings and the Miami Heat.
He did get a nice, albeit brief, run with the Heat this past season, getting rotation minutes in a five-game stretch as the Heat dealt with COVID-19 issues. Guy had two games with four made threes, and averaged 9.8 points per game on 51.4 percent shooting from the floor and 45 percent shooting from three.
But then he was relegated to the end of the bench, and then had to finish the 2021-2022 season back in the G League.
Heading into Year 4, then, Guy’s career is clearly at a crossroads.
You don’t make much money in the G League, where the base salary is $37,000 a year, though players on two-way deals make more when they get called up to the NBA.
Guy has made just a tick over $1 million in salary in his three pro seasons. For comparison, Hunter has made $22.3 million over his first three seasons, and is due an additional $22.7 million for the final two years of his rookie deal, and Jerome has made $6.9 million, and is in line to make an additional $10.4 million over the next two years if the Oklahoma City Thunder picks up the option on his rookie contract.
The money in Spain is nowhere near what the NBA pays, but it’s better than what you make in the G League.
This is one of those life ain’t fair kind of things with Guy, whose only drawback is lack of size, at 6’2”, 170 pounds.
He needs to be two or three inches taller, 20-25 pounds thicker, but such is life.
He’s tried the score-first point guard thing, and has put up good numbers in that role in the G League, but we’re three years in now, and every front office in the NBA has had a chance to see what he can do, and nobody is biting.
Spain may be as good as it gets for Guy.
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Chris Graham
