Hakim Warrick – 2018-19 G-League Player Profile

June 20th, 2019

Hakim Warrick

PF – 6’9, 219lbs – Born 8th July 1982

   Iowa Wolves   

Warrick left the NBA six years ago, cut by the Magic at the 2013 trade deadline, and is now 36 years old. The G-League has in recent times served increasingly often as a place for multi -year NBA veterans to come and try their hand at getting back into the big dance, with some successes (Damien Wilkins and Emeka Okafor, for example), yet Warrick’s absence from the big league has been a particularly long one. He has been employed in that time, of course; a season in China, a half-season in Turkey, a season split between Australia and Greece; a couple of summers in Puerto Rico; brief stints in the Lebanon and Israel. Yet the NBA has been a long time gone.

It is intriguing if a bit harsh on Warrick to reflect on how the NBA has moved on in that time. At his peak, Warrick was an athletic but undersized power forward, stuck with the dreaded ‘tweener’ status. He was never a big time rebounder, and never an impactful defender of any area of the court, but he was extremely athletic. He liked to run, and he liked to dunk, and in an era of stretch bigs, high ball screens and roll men, Warrick could have thrived more than when forced to post up as he so often was, back when such things were considered orthodoxy.

Of course, Warrick himself was never an outside shooter, and in the years hence, he still has not shown himself to be one, either. 6-9 shooting from three this season is fun, but not meaningful. Warrick retains much if not all of the athleticism of his youth; the hope is that that plus name recognition makes him a call-up candidate. But while the NBA at one point evolved in such a way that it would better suit him (and he was indeed a member of the very Steve Nash Suns teams that catalysed that revolution), the dominance of the three-point shot and switching defences means it might now have evolved beyond him again, too.

– 20th June, 2019

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