RJ Barrett<\/a>. <\/p>\n\u201cGreat guy. I love (Barrett). I love his family, I’m very excited to share the floor with him, hopefully this time he passes me the ball,\u201d Mamukelashvili said when asked about the reunion.<\/p>\n
He also did a pre-draft workout for the Raptors alongside A.J. Lawson back in 2021, but otherwise is coming in without any preconceived notions, other than he hopes he\u2019s found an NBA fit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fan base is amazing, Darko (Rajakovic, Raptors head coach) is a European coach, he understands the European style of play,\u201d said Mamukelashvili, who was born in New York City but raised in the Republic of Georgia before spending most of his high school years in Italy, playing club basketball there, prior to coming to the United States to finish high school and play college basketball.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a lot of young guys who want to get better, who want to get to the next level together.\u00a0 There’s nothing better than being a part of something like that, something where you can grow, get better yourself as a player, and be around the guys who are very motivated to get better.”<\/p>\n
On a per-36-minute basis, Mamukelashvili averaged 20.4 points and 9.9 rebounds while shooting 37.3 from three on 8.5 attempts for the Spurs last season. The Raptors hope that the spacing his shooting can provide and his instinct for cutting and ability to put the ball on the floor will add some offensive diversity to their second unit.<\/p>\n
The knock on him to this stage in his NBA journey is that while can cause some match-up problems for opposing centres on the offensive end, on the defensive end he\u2019s somewhat of a tweener: he lacks the size to hold his own against bigger NBA centres at the rim and the quickness to hang with more mobile bigs or power forwards on the perimeter.<\/p>\n
Mamukelashvili is working on it, spending time in the gym this summer working on close-out techniques and defensive footwork.<\/p>\n
\u201cI talked to Coach Darko (and) he said the first and most important thing is just to play hard,\u201d said Mamukelashvili, who signed a two-year deal for $5.26 million with the Raptors, with the second season being a player option. \u201cHe said, \u2018we play very aggressive defence\u2019, and I think that helps a guy like me. You know, when you’re aggressive, you might make a mistake, but it’s like you’re playing so hard, like most of the time you do not make mistakes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think passive defence \u2026 where I kind of play in-between, where I play the drop, and I have to kind of be a little bit passive (is where I struggle),\u201d he said. \u201cBut if you play me in the hedge (playing higher in screen and roll coverage), if you play me in the switch, I’ll definitely do my thing. So I’m really excited to take that part of my game to the next level as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hope on all sides is that Toronto is where Mamukelashvili can make a name for himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LAS VEGAS \u2014 For the record, it\u2019s pronounced this way: Sandro \u2014 as it looks, no issues there.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2555,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":["post-2554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}