Terps Legend Steve Blake, Lamar Odom Join BIG3 Basketball

Terps legend Steve Blake and NBA fan-favorite Lamar Odom are two of the latest retired NBA players to join the BIG3 basketball league.

Although he’s a Florida native, Steve Blake is a certified legend in the DMV basketball world. Between his prep career at Oak Hill Academy in Virginia, a full stay at Maryland, and multiple years with the Washington Wizards, he played locally for eight consecutive basketball seasons. Now, after an NBA career that featured notable stops in Portland and Los Angeles, Blake is continuing his playing career with Ice Cube’s BIG3 basketball league.

Two of his former teammates — Lamar Odom and Shannon Brown — also signed up for the league in 2019, as well as veterans like Kendrick Perkins and Eddy Curry. They will all join the BIG3 Draft pool — a group that will continue to grow as the season gets closer — in hopes of getting selected to participate in the league’s third season.

Luckily, there will be more opportunities to get drafted in 2019 because the BIG3 added four new teams¹ to the original eight. If they use the same draft format², there should be about 30 spots that draft-pool players will fill. With four fewer teams last year, they had 19 open roster spots, per BIG3.com.

Blake is best known locally for the part he played in Maryland’s 2002 National Championship run. A junior, he led the 2002 team in assists (7.9 APG) and joined DMV native Juan Dixon as the only players to start all 36 games. Ironically, the two would play together again in the DMV after both were draft picks of the Washington Wizards.

¹ Triplets, Enemies, Aliens, Bivouac 
² Each team has three pre-determined captains and three open roster spots going into the draft. However, the defending champion and runner-up are awarded the right to bring back non-captains from the previous year. More information from last year’s BIG3 Draft can be found here. I imagine this coming draft will have a similar structure.