After 12 seasons in the NBA, Patrick Beverley is headed overseas. The free-agent guard will sign with Hapoel Tel Aviv, he announced on social media Tuesday.
“They gave me everything I asked for,” Beverley said, according to his podcast’s X account. “I couldn’t refuse.”
Beverley, 36, teased this possibility on Sunday when his podcast account posted that he was “weighing his options between a NBA Vet Minimum contract and a HISTORIC contract in Europe,” along with a money bag emoji.
Given that Israel is not, in fact, in Europe, the news that Beverley has signed with Hapoel could be seen as a bit surprising. (The account repeated the error in Tuesday’s announcement.) There is a connection here, though. Beverley spent the 2011-12 season with Spartak St. Petersburg in Russia when Stefanos Dedas was an assistant coach for the club. Dedas is now Hapoel Tel Aviv’s head coach.
Beverley began last season with the Philadelphia 76ers, then was traded to the Milwaukee Bucks at the deadline. He split the previous season between the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers, and he was with the Minnesota Timberwolves the season before that. All that bouncing around stands in contrast to the first nine years of his NBA career, in which he spent five seasons with the Houston Rockets and four with the Los Angeles Clippers.
If Beverley doesn’t return to the NBA, he will finish his career with 666 total regular-season games played, in which he averaged 8.3 points, 4.1 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 1.1 steals in 26.6 minutes. These numbers do not capture what he brought to the table: Even in his mid-30s, Beverley was one of the most dogged point-of-attack defenders in the league and a helpful connector on the other end. As a nominal point guard, Beverley could always credibly initiate the offense but never needed the ball, which made him a good fit with ball-dominant stars.
If Beverley does return to the NBA, he will have to serve a suspension before he can get back on the court. In May, the league announced that he’d been suspended four games for throwing a basketball at spectators multiple times and an “inappropriate reaction with a reporter during media availability.” These incidents occurred during the Bucks’ first-round series against the Indiana Pacers; the interaction in question involved Beverley refusing to answer questions from a reporter because she was not a subscriber to his podcast.
Beverley will join a stacked roster. Hapoel Tel Aviv recently signed former Phoenix Suns forward Ish Wainright and former Los Angeles Clippers big man Johnathan Motley.
