Anthony Gill had interest from a number of teams in Europe, but the UVA Basketball alum decided to remain Stateside, reupping with the Washington Wizards a couple of weeks back.
Gill, a 2016 UVA alum, doesn’t get a lot of run in Washington – over four seasons, he’s been on the floor in 179 games, and he’s averaging a shade under 10 minutes per appearance.
In the 2023-2024 season, Gill played in 50 games, averaging 9.3 minutes per.
The lack of playing time was what had some basketball wags speculating that Gill, who will turn 32 before the 2024-2025 season opener, might want to consider a return to Europe, just to give himself a chance to get a little more PT before his career winds down.
But that would have involved a significant pay cut, and Gill earned a shade under $2 million with Washington last season.
Terms of his new deal were not disclosed, but you can imagine he didn’t take a pay cut, being an NBA veteran.
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Gill’s value to the Wiz is in the locker room. In the time that I covered him at UVA, I came to know him as a coach on the floor even back then.
My education in the finer points of the Pack-Line defense came from talking with Gill after games.
I thought back then that he would be a coach someday.
I’m guessing the Wizards front office sees the same thing in Gill, and, hey, he occasionally gives them some pop when he fills in as a rotation guy.
Gill went for double-digits seven times last season, and in Washington’s final 12 games of the 2023-2024 campaign, he averaged 9.9 points and 4.3 rebounds in 23.3 minutes per game.
The Wizards are in perpetual rebuild mode, and I don’t know that I see Gill starting off the 2024-2025 season as a rotation guy, necessarily; I’d assume the front office wants to go young, giving the minutes at the two forward spots to guys like #2 overall pick Alex Sarr, leading scorer Kyle Kuzma, 21-year-old third-year guy Patrick Baldwin Jr., and 20-year-old 2023 first-round pick Bilal Coulibaly.
Gill, based on his numbers as a fill-in rotation guy in the spring, is a good insurance policy in case one of those guys goes down for a stretch, and in the meantime, he’s a good locker-room guy.
That’s worth a couple of million dollars for the year.
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Chris Graham
