Timed Out: Tassie miss out on home grown stars

• Scott Roth says the JackJumpers could not wait on Reyne Smith or Jack McVeigh’s NBA ambitions.
• Both players have signed with Cairns, with McVeigh reportedly landing a seven-figure deal.
• Roth emphasised the importance of timing and securing recruits like Josh Bannan and David Johnson.

JackJumpers head coach Scott Roth insists the timelines didn’t fit to sign rising Ulverstone star Reyne Smith or lure championship winner Jack McVeigh back to the club next season, reports Code Sports Basketball.

Smith, 22, is currently playing for Australia alongside McVeigh at the FIBA Asia Cup, and got his chance after star showings in US college for Louisville Cardinals.

But Roth said they weren’t in a position to wait on the sharpshooter to make a call, given they had other signing targets like Josh Bannan and import David Johnson waiting in the wings.

Smith has since signed with Cairns, while McVeigh has also joined the Taipans on a reported seven-figure deal.

“We offered him (Smith) a contract at the beginning of the year,” Roth said at a club announcement of a new partnership with Tasmanian aviation company Rotor-Lift on Tuesday. “At that point he wanted to wait a few more months to go through everything, from college, to tryouts, to NBA things, to Summer League.

“We weren’t willing to wait and in the last two or three weeks he ended up signing with Cairns.”

Read the full story at Code Sports Basketball

Roth also revealed they had received a ‘buy out’ from McVeigh departure, before the 2023-24 NBL finals hero spent time with Houston Rockets on a two-day deal before landing at Cairns.

“Jack has been wonderful for us and the timeline for him coming back did not work,” Roth said.

“He’s been gone over a year now and when we had the opportunity to sign Josh Bannan, it was a no-brainer.

“Jack has earned the right, we got a nice buyout and he has the right to go and make as much money as he can. The timeline for players is short.

“It’s a credit also to our players and staff to get him in the position him to do that. Basketball is quite transactional with players, and what we’re proud of is we’re advancing careers and getting them better jobs. Jack falls into that category.

“All of our players have buyouts, they’re not going to walk away from us without getting anything in return.

“(Will) Magnay, Josh Bannan, any of these guys who sign a contract there’s a buyout connected to all of them, and different reasons to what the buyout might look like.”

Roth said he wouldn’t put other recruits in the tough position of selling to them what their role would be, only for it to change if McVeigh returned.

“We landed those two (Bannan and Johnson) relatively quickly. When I go to these guys and tell them what the landscape is like and how I put the team together, I can’t lie to them,” Roth said.

“Once we heard Jack wanted to wait again through the summer to go through the NBA process it just knocked us out of the park in regards to we’re not going to wait for that process to end.

“We have to put a team together, the timelines just weren’t aligned.”

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