It’s taken UVA Basketball alum Jay Huff forever to get to where he is now in the NBA: with job stability in the form of a four-year contract signed last week with the Memphis Grizzlies.
Huff, a five-year member of the Virginia program, from 2016-2021, put in a career-high 20 points for the Grizz on Saturday night in a 124-107 win over Philadelphia.
Huff was 7-of-10 from the floor and 5-of-7 from three in just 14 minutes.
Seven games into the 2024-2025 season, Huff is averaging a career-best 11.0 points per game in 16.6 minutes per game, shooting 61.4 percent from the floor and 55.6 percent from three, on good volume from three – he’s averaging 3.9 attempts from beyond the arc per game.
This is the Jay Huff that we’d expected to see ever since his first appearance as a redshirt freshman in 2017, when the 7’1” unicorn scored 16 points on 5-of-6 shooting, including 2-of-2 from three, in 24 minutes in a 93-49 win over Austin Peay.
After that, we didn’t see much from Huff on the floor until his redshirt junior season, and it was only in his redshirt senior season that he lived up to what we saw from him in that Austin Peay game – Huff averaged 13.0 points, 7.1 rebounds and 2.6 blocks, shooting 58.5 percent from the floor and 38.7 percent from three.
He then went undrafted, bouncing around the G League – where he averaged 16.0 points, 7.0 rebounds and 2.8 blocks per game, shooting 62.2 percent from the field and 34.8 percent from three over parts of three seasons – around brief cups of coffee in the NBA.
Huff’s career-high in NBA games came last season when he got into 20 games with the Denver Nuggets, averaging a modest 2.5 minutes per game.
Huff signed a two-way contract with Memphis in the summer, and has been getting regular minutes at center behind rookie Zach Edey in the Grizzlies’ rotation.
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Chris Graham
