Adelaide 36er Josh Giddey prepares for 2021 NBA Draft
Adelaide 36ers star Josh Giddey is about to live out his childhood dream to make the NBA, so how did the 18-year-old make it to the big time?
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Josh Giddey has the basketball world at his feet. He’s about to make the NBA, could be an Olympian in July and his life is about to be turned upside down. So it’s a good thing the 18-year-old owns more than 100 pairs of sneakers.
Giddey’s wide range of sneakers are an eclectic mix of old school retro ‘kicks’ to high end basketball shoes which keep his size 14 feet comfortable while out on the hardwood.
From the moment you walk into Giddey’s Glenelg home, the sneaker collection hits you right between the eyes. It’s a colourful display which fills walls.
“I don’t know the exact number but it’s a lot; it’s doubled since I first got here (to Adelaide),” Giddey says. “The majority of my more expensive shoes have come from this season. (Sponsor) Nike take care of me. I do buy a lot though online, but they save me a bit of money.”
Giddey owns Nike sneakers worth more than $3000 and most of the pairs in his collection cost more than $250. While a sponsorship deal is not official, it seems almost certain his signature is not too far away.
The 202cm playmaker is the talk of the basketball world, tipped to be among the top echelon in the National Basketball Association draft on July 29. Many experts say he’s a chance to go in the top 10, which could earn him a first-year annual income of up to $US4 million.
The down-to-earth Melbourne product has adopted Adelaide as his home over the past five months after choosing the 36ers as his final Australian resting stop before launching into a career in the US.
The NBL rookie sensation has a game-day routine with his shoes. He has been known to wear a different pair in each game, sometimes swapping at halftime.
“I usually try to wear a different pair each week and I try to keep it as spread out as I could so I don’t double up on a shoe,” he says. “I used to keep them in boxes and wouldn’t open them but now I’ve just started wearing all my shoes.”
Giddey’s father is two-time NBL champion and 449-game veteran Warrick. He’s the same shoe size as Josh and has inherited a nice collection for himself.
Luckily for Warrick, Josh is still growing. He grew a few centimetres during his year at the 36ers and his size 14 feet may become size 15 very soon.
“If he grows out of them all, it’s happy days for me,” Warrick says.
Giddey was brought up in a basketball family. Warrick Giddey played two seasons for Illawarra in the NBL before switching to the Melbourne Tigers in 1989, where he played his last game in 2002 – the year of Josh’s birth. Mother Kim also played professionally in the WNBL for the Tigers.
“I was born a Melbourne Tiger,” Giddey says. “All I was ever around was Melbourne Tigers. Dad then became assistant coach and I was always there, hanging around, at the games. Only 12 months ago I was in the stands as a fan, so things have happened pretty quickly.
“Growing up, all I wanted to do was play for the Melbourne Tigers, then I wanted to play for United (The Tigers rebranded as Melbourne United in 2014).”
One of four siblings, Giddey has three sisters who some say have the talent to match the NBL Next Star. Hannah, 19, is a freshman on a basketball scholarship at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while Neve, 16, and Ella, 13, both play top age junior basketball at the Tigers.
But Giddey admits he was the alpha of the household growing up.
“Ever since I was little and my older sister was little, we have always been around the game,” Giddey says. “She was playing basketball, so I was always really close with her and she was doing the same stuff I was; we have similar friends.
“But we would fight all the time. But, as we have all got older, we are really close now.”
Giddey said the one-on-one battles in the driveway stopped the moment he started to dominate. “They didn’t want to go and play and lose,” he says with a smile.
The Giddey children were either around the game or had a basketball in their hand almost every day. “Dad would always take us to trainings and school holiday camps, so it was inevitable we were always going to play,” Giddey says. “My older sister (Hannah) is already over in the States and my two younger sisters are dying to get over there.”
In fact, Warrick plans to move the family to the US after the NBA draft, depending on where Josh is located.
Giddey’s first basketball team was with Wembley Primary School, in Melbourne’s western suburbs, when he was in reception.
The team played together through to high school, won a state title in year 6 and was nicknamed the Wazzas, after their coach – Warrick Giddey.
Coaching and being a father at the same time wasn’t hard for Warrick, who admits he wasn’t shy in telling Josh a few home truths because he knew his potential from an early age.
“It was a constant kick up the arse if he didn’t pass the ball because he was better than most of the other kids,” Warrick says. “I taught him he had to be unselfish and to include his teammates. He could dominate games but we instilled in him early that it was all about the team.”
Josh Giddey’s childhood wasn’t all about basketball. He was also a promising Australian rules footballer and won several awards, including a league best and fairest, as a junior.
He stopped playing football at 15 when he joined the elite NBA Global Academy training centre at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra.
“Back then it was like three years before I was eligible for an AFL Draft,” Giddey says. “I do love footy; I almost preferred footy over basketball because it was just so much fun, the contact. I loved it.”
But basketball was in his blood. He joined the Melbourne Tigers junior program in under-12s and stayed there through to under-18s. During a six-year stretch, the side only lost two games and was mentored by Australian basketball legend Andrew Gaze – a seven-time NBL Most Valuable Player, 1999 NBA champion and two-time NBL title winner.
Giddey was the team’s point guard from the outset, blessed with the elite ball handling skills which come from growing up with a basketball in his hand most waking hours. As a youngster he was only average height, but a growth-spurt which started when he was 14 meant he had cracked the 200cm mark by the time he was 17. He’s added another couple of centimetres in the past year or so, and is still growing.
Despite his height, he has remained a point guard, a position he created history with at the 36ers this year, when he became the first Australian to notch back-to-back triple doubles – scoring double figures in three statistical categories, usually points, assists and rebounds.
“I was always the point guard, so it was always natural for me to have the ball,” Giddey says. “Regardless of how tall I got, I always had the ball in my hands.”
His prodigious talent attracted the attention of US scouts, and college scholarship offers arrived thick and fast during 2019 and 2020 but timing of playing college basketball became an issue.
Giddey finished high school at the start of 2021, and National Collegiate Athletic Association rules require players to be 12 months out of high school before entering the college system. So, by joining a college team, Giddey would have been effectively pushing back his NBA dream by 12 months.
The other option on the cards was to stay in Australia and be part of an NBL initiative called the NBL Next Stars program, initially launched to fast-track the NBA pathways for overseas players. The program was started after American Terrance Ferguson chose to play for the Adelaide 36ers in 2016-17 instead of pursuing a college career.
Ferguson was drafted by Oklahoma as pick 21 in the 2017 NBA Draft.
Giddey had offers from most major colleges, and visited the University of Colorado, where former Melbourne Tigers point guard Nate Tomlinson was coaching, but the experience of fellow NBA aspirants LaMelo Ball and RJ Hampton after they joined the Next Stars program swayed his thinking.
Ball, a member of a famous American basketball family, won the NBL rookie of the year award during a season with Illawarra in 2019 before being picked up at pick 3 by the Charlotte Hornets in the 2020 NBA Draft.
Hampton was a US high school star who joined the New Zealand Breakers on the Next Stars program in 2019 and made his NBA debut for the Denver Nuggets after being drafted at pick 24.
“It was a tough decision because I really had my heart set on going to college,” Giddey says.
“To see how well they (Ball and Hampton) did in the NBL and how well their games have translated to the NBA it made sense to me that this was a legitimate pathway for me to get there.”
When he committed to the 36ers in April last year, he became the first Australian signed to the Next Stars program.
He met with NBL commissioner Jeremy Loeliger in Melbourne to discuss the move, signed with agent Daniel Moldovan from Octagon, then met 36ers owner Grant Kelley and general manager of basketball Jeff Van Groningen at a cafe on The Rocks in Sydney.
“I flew to Sydney last season to watch the Sydney-Melbourne semi-final and I met with Jeff and Grant,” Giddey says.
“We met for an hour and they really sold me on Adelaide. They put the plans right in front of me.
“I’d heard some great things about Grant and Jeff, and that really pushed me towards Adelaide.
“I talked to a few other teams, but Adelaide was the clear frontrunner. Adelaide didn’t even have a coach at that stage, that was the crazy thing about it. I made the right decision, and I’m really happy with it.”
Next Stars must be eligible to nominate for the NBA Draft, and play at least one season with an NBL club before nominating for the draft the following year, or potentially the season after.
Van Groningen says Giddey’s US-based agent Daniel Moldovan was weighing up numerous options a couple of months out from the start of this NBL season.
“Daniel and I started talking about this young kid and he said ‘Giddey can play in the NBL right now’,” Van Groningen says. “He was saying, ‘I might put Josh in the NBL’ and I said ‘What, a 17-year-old?’, but he said, ‘He’s not a normal 17-year-old’.”
Giddey was 15 when he met Moldovan, who also managed Melbourne United pair Chris Goulding and Mitch McCarron.
“They told me there was a kid in Melbourne that was about 6’ 6” and he’s going to be good,” Moldovan says. “They said he is the real deal and you need to get a look at him ASAP.
“When I saw him play at the NBA Global Academy, I was sold. I flew to Australia, took them out for lunch and we hit it off.
“It never felt like an agent-client relationship from day one. Josh Giddey is now part of my family; he’s like a little brother to us.”
The family connection was also important for Van Groningen, who was general manager at the Melbourne Tigers when Warrick Giddey was playing.
He remembers Giddey locking horns with NBA and NBL players during training games in Melbourne during 2020, and Gaze and Boomers coach Brian Goorjian were watching the action.
“Andrew Gaze would not bet on the sun coming up tomorrow, and that’s an understatement,” Van Groningen says. “He is extremely conservative when it comes to players, his standards are pretty high.”
But when he called Gaze for an unrelated matter, Giddey was brought up in the conversation, and Van Groningen knew the Tigers legend was impressed. About two weeks later the pair was speaking on the phone again. “He called and the only thing he said was, ‘Get Giddey’,” Van Groningen says. “It was the shortest conversation we have ever had.”
Gaze, who admits he is biased because he has coached Giddey since he was a youngster, says his progress and development is a testament to both the player and his family. And he thinks the move to Adelaide was a perfect fit for both player and club.
“What Josh has done this year and where he is heading, wow, it’s exciting,” he says. “They knew what they were getting into with Josh and I think they got the balance right.
“I know Jeff (Van Groningen) very well and what Adelaide has done for Josh is exceptional. They made sure they gave him every opportunity to excel but not at the expense of the team or compromising the relationship with his teammates.” Giddey made his mark quickly at the 36ers, and was given the starting point guard early in the season after import Donald Sloan was released.
His impact has also been profound off the court for Adelaide, which has featured in discussions throughout the basketball universe in the countdown to the NBA Draft.
Ultimately though, when the Sixers fell out of finals contention, Giddey reluctantly agreed that the looming NBA Draft was too important for him to continue playing and risk an injury.
“It’s tough sitting there watching as I want to be out there playing,” Giddey says. “It’s hard, especially when you’re losing, you want to be out there helping.”
The rewards for Giddey, the 36ers and the NBL are too good for Josh to keep putting himself in harm’s way. First round NBA draft picks are guaranteed around $US2 million annual salary, plus endorsements from potential sponsors.
His 36ers contract, which is a two-year deal, will be bought out by whichever NBA team calls out his name on July 29. The size of the buyout figure is a closely guarded secret but is likely to be significant. It will be shared between the NBL, the 36ers and Giddey, and place them all in a healthy financial position.
One man who knows all too well about a huge payday is South Australian NBA star Joe Ingles.
In 2017, Ingles signed a four-year, $75 million contract to remain with the Utah Jazz in the NBA and has recently agreed to a $20 million one-year extension.
Ingles has had a huge impact in Giddey’s first professional season, and the two haven’t even met in person yet.
“It’s all been through social media,” Giddey says. “He hit me up and said congratulations with signing with Adelaide and said ‘if there’s anything you need just reach out’ and we started talking.”
Giddey said Ingles’ advice has been profound and he knows the Jazz swingman can relate to his situation after Ingles joined the now defunct South Dragons in the NBL as a teenager in 2006.
“Joe is probably at the peak of his game right now playing in the NBA and he’s a Boomers star,” Giddey says. “To have a guy like him in your corner, someone you can lean on, is really good.
“He came through the same pathway as I did in the NBL, he knows where I’m coming from, he can relate to me. He’s been good for me, helping me out bad games, through good games, giving me advice.”
The next three months are going to be the biggest in Giddey’s life and he can’t wait to see what happens around the corner. “It’s exciting to see what’s to come and I can’t thank Adelaide and the NBL enough for the opportunity,” Giddey says.
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