The Sacramento Kings made a bit of history on Thursday, officially calling up center Sim Bhullar from their D-League affiliate, the Reno Bighorns, and signing him to a 10-day contract on Thursday. The 7-foot-5, 360-pound Bhullar is the first player of Indian descent to appear on an NBA team's regular-season roster.
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Bhullar's decision to turn pro last spring after two years at New Mexico State — a stint that saw the Aggies make consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances, with Bhullar earning recognition as the Most Valuable Player in the 2014 Western Athletic Conference Tournament for his work patrolling the paint — shocked many observers who saw the massive center's raw skill-set and lacking conditioning as glaring problems that would prevent him from being able to make an immediate impact at the NBA level. While such critiques overlooked the fact that players of Bhullar's dimensions often have shorter careers and more limited windows for pro earning potential than their smaller peers, making it entirely reasonable that he'd make the jump even without being fully ready for the NBA game, the underpinnings of the argument were accurate, and Bhullar was not selected in the 2014 NBA draft.
He did, however, catch on with the Kings' Las Vegas Summer League team. Despite playing only a minor role — just 10 total minutes in four games — on the team that won the Vegas title, Bhullar's unique size and background made him an attractive enough commodity to Mumbai-born Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé for Sacramento to sign the center to a training-camp contract back in August.
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"I've long believed that India is the next great frontier for the NBA, and adding a talented player like Sim only underscores the exponential growth basketball has experienced in that nation," Ranadivé said in a press release announcing Bhullar's signing. "While Sim is the first player of Indian descent to sign with an NBA franchise, he represents one of many that will emerge from that region as the game continues to garner more attention and generate ever-increasing passion among a new generation of Indian fans."
The emergence took some time, though, as the Kings waived Bhullar 10 days before the start of the season and sent him down to Reno for some of the conditioning and skill-development work many felt he needed coming out of college. The hulking Toronto native seemed an odd stylistic fit with a Reno club that hired David Arseneault Jr., a former assistant on run-and-gun Division III squad Grinnell College, to bring a fast-paced system to the Kings' D-League squad. But Bhullar has, somewhat surprisingly, flourished in the uptempo style, averaging 10.3 points, 8.8 rebounds and 3.9 blocks in 25.8 minutes per game in Reno:
Bhullar leads the D-League in field-goal percentage (72.7 percent) and block percentage, rejecting 9.5 percent of opponents' field-goal attempts during his time on the floor. Back in February, he posted the first triple-double of his professional career, scoring 26 points, snagging 17 rebounds and blocking 11 shots in a matchup with the L.A. D-Fenders, the Los Angeles Lakers' D-League affiliate.
The Bighorns kept Bhullar's minutes down and gave him multiple rest days in the early going. As the season has gone on, though, Bhullar has reportedly dropped more than 30 pounds, helping him to seem more comfortable staying out on the court for longer stretches, averaging 30.4 minutes per game in March, including five contests in which he logged at least 37 minutes.
If a trimmed-down version of Bhullar can get up and down at the NBA level, his sheer size and presence as a paint-clogging rim protector could make him an intriguing piece for new Kings head coach George Karl to play with.
"He adds a very interesting dimension to the game," Karl told ESPN.com's Marc Stein, who first reported Bhullar was likely to get the call-up. "And our game is becoming an international game and India is becoming one of the greatest, largest, biggest democracies in the world and I think it's a good story and hopefully we'll find some minutes for him."
Reports earlier this week suggested that Karl and the Kings were considering shutting down All-Star center DeMarcus Cousins as Sacramento plays out the string of yet another lottery-bound season. While Cousins did play against the Houston Rockets on Wednesday night, putting up a remarkable 24-point, 21-rebound, 10-assist, six-block, three-steal triple-double but coming up short thanks to James Harden's career-high 51-point explosion, giving him a bit of a breather down the stretch could give Karl a chance to take a look at Bhullar first-hand, and would give Bhullar the chance to take the next step in his historic journey — from first player of Indian descent to sign a contract, to first player of Indian descent to appear on a regular-season roster, to first player of Indian descent to actually appear in an NBA game.
If and when Bhullar does check in off the Kings' bench, it will represent a watershed moment that "has been a long, long time coming," as Akshay Manwani wrote for NBA India:
The Germans first had Detlef Schrempf and then Dirk Nowitzki. The Australians sent big-man Luc Longley to play alongside [Michael] Jordan and Scottie Pippen in the 1990s while the Croatians had Drazen Petrovic and Toni Kukoc. Arvydas Sabonis came to play from Lithuania but before him there was Sarunas Marciulionis. The French had Tony Parker. The Argentinians had Manu Ginobili. The Chinese, our neighbours, and rivals on several fronts, had Yao Ming, whose selection in the 2002 NBA Draft caused an overnight surge in the following of the game in China.
With the increasing presence of players from across the globe in the NBA and better television coverage of the league in India, hoops fans were waiting for someone from amongst our own to cheer for. As the NBA invested in the game in India, building at the grassroots level, educating coaches, holding clinics for children and the youth, we knew it was only a matter of time before the ‘chosen one’ came along. But patience is a rare virtue in today’s day and age and so we asked anybody who visited — David Stern, Chris Bosh, Bruce Bowen — when, oh when would an Indian player make his NBA debut? Some said ‘three years’, some said ‘five’. Some said ‘soon’, while others simply asked us to, well, ‘be patient’.
In the meantime, we wore LeBron James inspired headbands, imitated Kobe Bryant’s swagger, cheered for the Chicago Bulls, the San Antonio Spurs, the Los Angeles Lakers, the Boston Celtics, but ultimately yearned and awaited for the coming of that one prodigal son into the league, whom we could raucously applaud for being our own.
The time for such applause is almost at hand. Seems like a slightly bigger deal than your average 10-day contract in the last two weeks of a season, huh?
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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