What Happened to Martin Iti?

It’s a fairly common story: a promising Australian goes to America to further their basketball prospects by either attending high school or college.  After they graduate from their respective institutions the wiser and more complete player will come back to Australia and play out their career in the NBL.  It happened to Anatoly Bose, Aaron Bruce and Andrew Gaze.  So you would think that would be the plan for Martin Iti right?

Let’s go back a bit, shall we?  Iti’s high school career was illustrious, graduating from the fabled Mount Zion Christian Academy which has notable alumni like Amare Stoudemire, Tracy McGrady and Brandon Rush.  Sounds good so far.  The amazing note is that he was in the stratosphere in the rankings.  So high in fact that ESPN had him as the number eight high school recruit in the nation and the best centre in the whole country as a senior.  In the 2003 high school class that included LeBron James and Chris Paul he was rating higher than many NBA first round picks such as Joakim Noah and Adam Morrison as well as former NBL MVP Gary Ervin.  The respected recruiting website Rivals had him as a four star recruit and the seventh best centre in all of America.  Scout.com said that he “Has the potential to make a lot of money playing this game”.  For someone so highly touted you would think that several major colleges would be knocking on his door.

Not so as he picked by the minnow Charlotte 49ers but made the best of it, being named to the Conference USA all-freshman team as he averaged 6.0 points and 4.7 rebounds in his first year.  Confusingly he put his name in for the NBA draft but after an underwhelming pre-draft camp he decided to withdraw his name from the draft and go back to Charlotte.  Unfortunately his sophomore season was worse than his first and he became frustrated and transferred to the hilariously named Aggies of New Mexico State.  His next season (after sitting out one for the transfer) was better even though he didn’t play as many minutes but regressed in his senior year.  Predictably he wasn’t drafted to an NBA team.

After the draft he played for the Rotterdam Challengers in Holland then came back to New Zealand to play for the Southland Sharks and now onto the Sydney Kings where he is averaging 3.5 minutes a game.  So what went wrong?  My guess is that there were a few factors.

The first factor was that in his high school career he went to six high schools, taking away his chance to gel with a team and really get into a groove for his game to flourish.  Another black mark stemming from all this moving around is that many scouts would be wary of someone who moves around too much, it shows that he runs when things aren’t going his way (there was talk that he changed schools because he wasn’t the focal point of the team).

The biggest factor would be that he probably isn’t very good.  Although he was listed at seven feet tall at college he was measured at only 6’8 ½” at the NBA pre-draft camp, massively hindering his chances as a centre.  His weaknesses would have been overshadowed by the fact that in most high school basketball games any player with height and an ounce of skill would dominate against smaller, weaker opponents.  He had good defensive instincts but that only takes someone so far and he was outed as a poor recruit.  He played reasonably well for Southland but has been glued to the pine playing for the woeful Kings which rings alarm bells straight away.

So what’s next for the fallen one?  In his first real game as a King substituting for the injured Julian Khazzouh he was ineffective, fouling out in only eleven minutes with two rebounds and a block.  He will get his chance again this week with Khazzouh out again in their matchup with Wollongong, so hopefully he takes his opportunity with both hands.  He has the talent and the size, he just needs to prove to the team and more importantly himself that he can become one of the dominant defensive big men in the league and maybe he could live up to his lofty hype from so many years ago.