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In addition, other candidates for Atlanta’s president position include Orlando Magic Senior Advisor of Basketball Operations John Hammond and NBA G League President Shareef Abdur-Rahim, and others potentially, league sources told HoopsHype. In addition to Fields’ departure with one more season remaining on his contract, according to league sources who spoke with HoopsHype, former Hawks Vice President of Basketball Operations Grant Liffman departed from the organization as Chris Haynes first reported, and Hawks executive advisor Chris Emens is not expected to remain with Atlanta, league sources told HoopsHype.
Amir Abdur-Rahim, the head men’s basketball coach at USF, died, the school announced Thursday. He was 43. He “was undergoing a medical procedure at a Tampa-area hospital when he passed away due to complications that arose during the procedure,” according to a release from the school. Abdur-Rahim, who played collegiately, was the younger brother of Shareef Abdur-Rahim, who went on to NBA stardom after playing in college. They had another brother, Muhammad Abdur-Rahim, who also played in college.
New additions to the board are NBA executive vice president and head of basketball operations Joe Dumars, Duke athletic director Nina King, Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sankey, NCAA vice president of women’s basketball Lynn Holzman, NJCAA president and CEO Christopher Parker, four-time Olympic gold medalist Sylvia Fowles, two-time Olympic gold medalist Lindsay Whalen and 2000 Olympic gold medalist Shareef Abdur-Raheem.
Whenever commissioner Adam Silver steps before an NBA-branded lectern, each occasion tends to send ripples across the league. This February, once the commissioner declared during All-Star Weekend’s media availability his office was “assessing” the viability of G League Ignite, an initial expectation among figures throughout the NBA’s development league was that the association would likely shutter its club for elite, draft-eligible prospects by the end of next season. Instead, the curtain is being closed at the conclusion of this very campaign, G League president Shareef Abdur-Rahim announced last week, bringing to an end a four-year experiment that brought mixed results.
To better contextualize its ending, it’s important to recall how Ignite began. The NBA launched the program in April 2020, with a commitment from top-ranked prospect Jalen Green, now the Rockets’ third-year guard who is spearheading Houston’s late-season playoff bid in the Western Conference. Ignite arrived on the heels of former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leading a group investigation into the underworld of college basketball recruiting — a shadow game that also provoked an FBI probe into sneaker company and agency payola connections within numerous major NCAA programs. The NBA, too, watched a pair of highly touted prospects, LaMelo Ball and R.J. Hampton, depart for Australia’s National Basketball League before they would enter the 2020 NBA Draft.
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“We were so laser focused on how to help create a pathway,” Abdur-Rahim told Yahoo Sports on Wednesday over the phone from Henderson, Nevada, where the former 12-year NBA veteran was on hand with Ignite's staff for the final days of their final season. “We thought if kids wanted to be professionals [before entering the NBA], we felt we could have a place. We wanted to help solve a problem.”
Ignite’s structure and operating procedures weren’t truly congruent with the G League teams that occupied the opposing sidelines of Dollar Loan Center. Every rival club, for example, has been limited to paying their players the standard G League salary, which maxed out at $40,500 this season. Many within the league can earn significant paydays by first signing Exhibit 10 contracts worth up to $75,000 with an NBA team. But each of those deals and their guaranteed money are required to be submitted to a league-wide contract database called PCMS, while Ignite never met requests from opposing G League executives to disclose its operating budget or base payments for its players, sources said. The lower range of those salaries for Ignite’s veteran players was roughly $50,000, league sources told Yahoo Sports. Some made upward of $150,000. Factor in Ignite signing Henderson to a two-year contract worth over $1 million, to go along with this year’s leading prospect, Ron Holland, inking a lucrative deal north of Henderson’s $500,000 number, sources said, and multiple G League general managers estimated Ignite operated with as much as three times the spending power of their rival front offices.
![“We were not outbidding NBA [affiliate] teams for …](https://sportsdata.usatoday.com/gcdn/content-pipeline-sports-images/sports2/nba/players/696050.png?format=png8&auto=webp&quality=85,75&width=140)
“We were not outbidding NBA [affiliate] teams for players,” Abdur-Rahim told Yahoo Sports. He went on to explain that Ignite had its disadvantages compared to other G League teams, as Ignite was barred from taking part in the annual draft and from making midseason trades. Prior to each campaign, however, Ignite had the ability to acquire veteran players whose rights were otherwise held by other G League teams. Ignite was able to add Cameron Young from the Cleveland Charge for last season, for example, then brought in David Stockton and later Gabe York from the Indiana Mad Ants this campaign, without providing any form of redress to that G League team. “That was a sore spot,” Abdur-Rahim said. “It had gotten to the point that if we continued forward with Ignite, we were gonna have to figure that out.”
G League Stockton Kings guard Jaylen Nowell has been suspended one game without pay for directing inappropriate language toward a game official. G League president Shareef Abdur-Rahim announced the suspension Monday. Nowell was assessed a technical foul and ejected after making the inappropriate comments to an official at the conclusion of the second quarter during Stockton’s 112-111 victory over the Rio Grande Vipers on Friday at Adventist Health Arena in Stockton.
“I think it’s changed from being a league full of guys that were overlooked and nobody appreciated to being a league of burgeoning stars,” says Shareef Abdur-Rahim, the former NBA All-Star who now serves as the G League president.
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Jorge Sierra: ALL-TIME SCORING RANKING UPDATE Kyle Lowry is now No. 119 all-time after passing Amare Stoudemire. Kevin Love passed Shareef Abdur-Rahim for No. 150. A tough night for 00's power forwards.
Henderson has provided a roadmap. "It’s his intellectual maturity and emotional maturity," G League president Shareef Abdur-Rahim told USA TODAY Sports. "You want him to struggle some and see how he managed the difficult times, how he managed success, how he owned mistakes, how he grew. … Across the board, he's just really like unique in that sense for someone his age." Abdur-Rahim, who spent 12 seasons in the NBA, credits Henderson’s parents, Chris and Crystal, for instilling those qualities. "They supported him and allowed him to grow up and get prepared," Abdur-Rahim said. (Henderson’s sister, Crystal, led Kell (Marietta, Ga.) High to a 5A state title in 2023, scoring 29 points in the championship game, and she will play college basketball at Georgia State, according to the school’s web site.)
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