The NBA Draft, the event where the thirty league teams choose the best young players around to add to their squads, will be held at ESPN’s TV studios on the night of November 18-19, and not in May as traditionally, due to the pandemic and the postponement of the past season. Among the young people who will probably be called to the 2020 draft there is also an Italian, Nico Mannion, a nineteen-year-old playmaker from the University of Arizona who could therefore become the fourth Italian in the NBA after Marco Belinelli, Danilo Gallinari and Nicolò Melli.
Mannion – whose real name is Niccolò – was born in 2001 in Siena and is the son of Pace Mannion, an American basketball player with a long career between the NBA and the Italian Serie A, and of Gaia Bianchi, a former volleyball player from Guidonia. His father, originally from Salt Lake City, played in the NBA with Golden State, Utah, New Jersey and Milwaukee before moving to Italy in 1989. He stayed there for thirteen years, during which he played in Cantù, Treviso, Reggio Emilia and Caserta, cities in which he met his wife. After his father’s last experiences as a player between Siena and Cefalù, in 2003 the family returned to the United States and settled in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Mannion then grew up in Scottsdale and started playing basketball there. His racing career began in 2015 with the team from Pinnacle High School, north of Phoenix. With an average of 20.2 points and 4.7 assists per game in the first year, 23.4 / 4.7 the second and 30.4 / 6.2 the third, Mannion was the leader of the team, with which he set new season records for the institute. In 2017 – the year in which he decided to accept the call from Italy by going to play the Under 17 European Championships – the magazine Sports Illustrated described him as a fifteen-year-old prodigy, and in fact he was able to choose the university for which to go and play a year earlier than average.
He chose the University of Arizona in Tucson, whose team has seen seventy-two NBA players, many of them point guards like Mannion: above all Steve Kerr, Damon Stoudamire and Gilbert Arenas. For observers and experts, the great tradition of point guards who left the institute should continue with Mannion, despite having played only one university season, however interrupted by the pandemic, keeping an average of 14 points and 5.3 assists per game, as a rookie. While still in full development, he has a slender physique for the NBA but is aided by his five foot three inches tall and the explosive power he has in his legs.
In the draft he could be selected between the tenth and thirtieth call, between the first and second picks. In these days he has trained in front of the observers of the Los Angeles Lakers, the team he supports, who are looking for new point guards, but according to the latest rumors he could be called by the Sacramento Kings, the Boston Celtics or the Utah Jazz, the team of the city from which the father comes. If in the next season he were to make his debut in the best basketball league in the world, it will not be his debut among the professionals anyway. already happened two years ago with Italy in the qualifiers for the World Cup in China.
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