John referenced this past Tuesday that Impact Basketball is launching their own league starting in September, and that news has since been met with a number of players around the NBA world calling shotgun on a roster spot. Nothing is official yet, but rosters will reportedly be announced on September 6th, with league games slated to start on September 12th.
The initial list of players linked to the league included those who work out at Joe Abunassar’s world premier Impact Basketball training facilities already; guys like Chauncey Billups, John Wall, Paul Pierce, Al Harrington, Corey Maggette, Kyle Lowry, J.J. Hickson, Austin Daye, Jared Dudley, Dahntay Jones, Jermaine O’Neal, Craig Brackins, Marreese Speights, Eric Bledsoe, Matt Barnes, Manny Harris and others. I mean, right there you could field some pretty outstanding five-on-five match-ups alone, but there appears to be more players coming. Plenty more.
Hoopsworld reported over the weekend that Blake Griffin, Kevin Durant, Brandon Jennings, and a number of others including possibly most of the Clippers’ team are also reaching out to Impact to express their interest in playing as well.
This according to Alex Kennedy on Saturday:
“Blake Griffin and Mo Williams haven’t yet committed, but they seem very interested in playing. They were actually trying to organize team workouts at Impact prior to the league’s formation, so it appears they’ll bring their other members of the Los Angeles Clippers as well.
Danny Granger and Paul George are among the players interested in participating in the league.
Nazr Mohammed, who has worked out at Impact in the past, has reached out to his Oklahoma City Thunder teammates about playing in Las Vegas as well. Kevin Durant appears to be interested. Brandon Jennings has also been in touch with organizers and expressed interest in the league.”
This league has the potential to be pretty awesome, I think, and from what I heard it will be the most organized and well-run of all the league’s we’ve seen so far this summer as well. And I’m hopeful that it does end up being streamed online, because there are going to be a lot of All Stars under the same roof if many of these names we’ve seen linked to this league so far do end up playing. There’s no reason to think that more won’t be joining them too, and there’s also no reason to think that everybody there won’t be playing as hard as they have all lockout long. That’s what people do when they train at Impact Basketball, they go hard.
We’ll be sure to keep you posted moving forward as more develops leading up to September 12th.
