Here on Brooklyn Balling, I’ll try to recap the chaos that was the 2013-14 Nets season with a series of “Season Review” posts on the players, trades, and even coach that shaped how this year turned out. Marcus Thornton was last, and Tyshawn Taylor is up next.
New Jersey native Tyshawn Taylor, since being traded to the Nets from the Portland Trail Blazers on draft day of 2012 for cash, never really got a chance to be anything more than the reserve point guard and garbage time contributor that he was with the team. Outside of a stretch in which he started for an injured Deron Williams in the beginning of the 2013-14, Taylor was mostly relegated to the bench.
That is, until he was traded by Brooklyn to the New Orleans Pelicans in January, a move that accompanied Brooklyn sending lightly-used forward Tornike “Toko” Shengalia to the Chicago Bulls for another point guard, Marquis Teague, younger brother of the Hawks’ Jeff Teague. Taylor didn’t play a minute for the Pelicans before being released.
In the time he was able to actually play some minutes for the Nets, Taylor showed the upside that helped him lead his Kansas Jayhawks to the NCAA Championship game during his senior year (they lost to a Kentucky Wildcats team led by, ironically enough, Marquis Teague). However, Tyshawn looked overwhelmed at times and couldn’t get his shots to fall, with a slashline of 34%/25% (FG%/3FG%) this past season.
Who knows if he’ll get another shot in the NBA, or maybe overseas, but Tyshawn Taylor probably deserves a chance somewhere. He’s an athletic point guard who was coached incredibly well by Bill Self at Kansas and has demonstrated plenty of raw talent. He just needs to mature as a player and realize what role he could possibly fill on the basketball floor for a professional team.
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