Although his French team’s season has yet to finish, reports out of Europe indicate that American/Macedonian point guard T.J. Shorts will leave his Paris Basket team this summer, spurn EuroLeague offers, and head to the NBA, where he will sign with the Memphis Grizzlies.
As first reported by BasketEurope, Shorts will leave the French capital to return to America, and try to make the NBA for the first time. Since graduating from UC Davis in 2019, he has been building himself a quality career in Europe, where he has risen up to the levels all the way to the very top.
Shorts’s Quick Rise
Shorts is currently completing his second season with Paris, a team founded as recently as 2018 and replete with NBA links in the forms of its President, ex-Minnesota Timberwolves General Manager David Kahn, and head coach, ex-San Antonio Spurs, Philadelphia 76ers and Atlanta Hawks player Tiago Splitter.
As Paris has risen, so as Shorts; after leading them to a EuroCup championship victory in 2023-24 season (the second-tier intra-continental club competition), he has now led his team to a (the first-tier one to which EuroCup winners automatically qualify),
On his way, Shorts has won myriad individual accolades. In the 2023-24 season, he was voted the Most Valuable Player of both the EuroCup and the French domestic league, the LNB.
In 2022-23, while playing for Telekom Baskets Bonn, he was MVP of both the German domestic league, the Bundesliga, and the third-tier Europe-wide competition, the Champions League.
And in 2021-22, playing for another German team in Craislheim, he led the Bundesliga in scoring while winning the MVP award at the fourth-tier competition, the Europe Cup.
For four consecutive seasons, then, Shorts has taken the next level up, and been arguably the best guard in the competition.
When the EuroLeague postseason awards announced, Shorts – who has already finished the regular season as the competition’s assist leader, made the All-EuroLeague First Team, and won the MVP award in both the Play-In Round and the month of November – may well find himself picking up yet more MVP awards, both domestically and across the continent.
