The Drubbing

Ricky Rubio wasn’t ready for the NBA, but we knew that. According to an ESPN.com article, the Minnesota Timberwolves seem to have thought they had a deal in place with Rubio and his current team, DKV Joventut, to bring Ricky Rubio to the NBA this season, that’s the surprising part. The not-so-shocking part is that Minnesota Timberwolves president David Kahn says that Rubio and his family backed out of the deal, making way for Rubio to be traded to FC Barcelona, as was previously announced. It also appears that Rubio has admitted that he was not ready to play in the NBA.

Kahn was quoted as saying “The NBA is the best basketball league in the world, by far. As an 18-year-old man, Ricky would have been challenged on a nightly basis to a degree he has never experienced… I also agreed with Ricky’s position that two more years of competition in Spain and the Euroleague will only aid his development and that he will be much more ready for the NBA when he joins us.” Rubio himself said, “The reason leading me to take this next step is to have a period of preparation to better take the challenge of the NBA in better conditions as a player.”

To recap, it appears that as I stated back in August,  Rubio was a product of the great European hype machine (see Frédéric Weis, Nikoloz Tskitishvili and Maciej Lampe). Clearly not not an NBA-caliber player at this point in his career. There’s no doubt that he made the right move by entering the draft at the peak of his popularity, solidifying himself as a lottery selection and setting himself up to cash in, in a big way. And now that Rubio has admitted it, hopefully we all can agree on what many of us had already figured out, that he wasn’t ready for the NBA game. Now we all get to wait and see. But these two years should give Rubio a great opportunity to better prepare himself for the physicality of the NBA, and put up some real numbers in the Spanish league. Numbers that will make him worthy of the NBA draft pick that was used on him.