Q: “As a scouting service, here at Inside Scouting, we focus a lot on college basketball. Ermal, you had your own experience in the NCAA. I was wondering if you’d like to explain to us how this opportunity came to you and how much do you think it impacted your career.”
Ermal Kuqo: “I think it was the most important step that I’ve ever taken in my career, it was so monumental that it changed my life, actually. I got lucky, I don’t know, maybe it was written in the stars, that my first college head coach, and the only one that I’ve worked with was Chris Beard, that was his first head coaching job, in a junior college in Kansas called Fort Scott College. At that time, it was 1999, and the Jayhawk Conference it was one of the most competitive in junior college. In my freshman year, in that same conference, there were players like Reggie Evans and Jannero Pargo. Back then, junior college was a really really strong competition. Before making the jump to the college, I was playing for Fenerbahce. Of course, growing up in Albania, I wasn’t particularly aware of the NCAA rules and stuff like that. After spending four years in Turkey with Fenerbahce, I felt like I wasn’t maximizing my potential. One of my teammates at that time, Conrad McRae, told me that I should have considered other options because I wasn’t playing much in Fenerbahce. So he told me that I should have considered going to college in the US because I knew the language and he thought that my skillset would have been perfect for college basketball. So Conrad made a few phone calls and I started to get recruited by a couple of schools. During my last year in Fener, I spent half of the season preparing for the SATs but the results came so late that I wasn’t able to register for the fall semester. I had decided that I wanted to go to the University of Texas but because I couldn’t register due to the late results of the SAT, the coach told me that the best option for me was going to a junior college. In junior college, coach Beard really did a great job on me and was able to maximize my talent, he completely reshaped my work ethic. The main thing that I learned from him was how to work hard to reach my goals. You know, since I was a little kid, I always had big ambitions: I wanted to go to the NBA, I wanted to become a great player. But up until college, I felt like I was working hard but not effectively enough to reach my potential, coach Beard was able to change that and showed me a new way to improve my game. That’s what college basketball teached me, even though it was only junior college. As you know, I wasn’t able to play in the NCAA. At first, I was a bit unlucky, because after my first year in junior college, I decided to play for the University of Tulsa for coach Bill Self. But right after I signed my letter of intent, coach Self moved to Illinois, Tulsa didn’t want to let me go, so my only two options were returning to a junior college or going back to Europe. I decided to play another year in junior college, again for coach Beard but this time for Seminole State College. I had a great season there and the next year coach Bobby Knight got hired by Texas Tech University, he went down to Seminole, worked out with me and offered me a spot on the team right away, he also hired coach Beard on the spot. So I signed the letter of intent to play for Texas Tech but the NCAA told me that I already had played under a professional contract when I was in Fenerbahce and that I could get a 35-40 game suspension because of that. So to avoid that suspension, I decided to go back to Europe but those two years in junior college were so valuable to me. I realized that I was much tougher mentally than I thought I was, after that experience, nothing was hard for me. I was playing in what it was called an arena but it was basically a barn with a basketball court in it, our program didn’t have any money, we were having cheese sandwiches for dinner, and we were driving five hours in little vans to get to the game and then return home way past midnight. It was tough but it also taught me so many things about myself”.
Q: “In recent years, the NCAA world has changed considerably. Now with the NIL deals college athletes can get paid and they have the tendency to stay longer at school because they can make good money there. Also, European prospects are going to the US more often, while European clubs are losing their talents very early. How much of an impact do you think these changes will have on the professional world, both in the NBA and in Europe?”
Ermal Kuqo: “I don’t think it’s gonna have too much of an impact on the NBA. The NBA won’t have rivals. I think it’s a situation that helps those players who in the past decided to leave too early for the NBA Draft and then they realized they weren’t among the 60 best players. Now these types of players can stay in school one or two years more, thanks to the NIL deals, and start their pro career a little bit later. Guys who tend to stay in college a bit longer usually have more maturity and, in my opinion, they’re more prepared to have a solid career as pro. Maybe they’re less enticing because we always want to find the 18-year-old kid who can shoot, dunk, and be an all-around player but those players are very rare. But now the focus is more on the players who can be the glue guys, who can play on both ends of the court and be effective, players like Bruce Brown, Jeff Green, and Trevor Ariza, because they can make a huge impact on your team and can help you win games. I work for the Los Angeles Clippers so I could point out the example of Terance Mann. He fits the profile that I was talking about before. He was in college for four years, he was one of those players who helped you win games, a glue guy, always able to make the right play at the right time. In my opinion, the NIL deals will help those type of guys in staying longer at school and reaching their full potential before making the jump either to the NBA or to Europe. But NIL does have a huge impact on European basketball. First reason because, again, guys will stay longer in school so there’ll be less players available for the European market. But, as you mentioned, there’s also the fact that NCAA now is attracting more and more young European prospects who go there knowing they can make really good money and having a huge experience. Europe now needs to compete not only against the NBA and the two-way deals but also against the NCAA. But I believe we still need a couple of years before fully realize how much of an impact these NIL deals will have, in the US they’re still trying to regulate them in a proper manner”.
Q: “Ermal, you’ve been working with the LA Clippers for several years now and you started your career as a scout pretty much immediately after the end of your pro career. Would you like to explain to us how that whole process started for you? Who reached out to you first about that opportunity? How your career has developed in that regard?”
Ermal Kuqo: “I actually finished my pro career because I had the opportunity to work for the Clippers but it was a process that was ongoing for a couple of years. When I signed in Spain to play for Valencia the person who signed me was Johnny Rogers, he was the GM of Valencia at that time. We remained in touch over the years, even after I left Valencia, and we became really good friends. After he was done working in the EuroLeague, he started to work for the Oklahoma City Thunder as a scout. He’d reach out to me when I was playing for Anadolu Efes and asked me about some of my teammates. You know, I was playing with Cedi Osman, with Jordan Farmar, but Johnny’d ask me also about players that I was playing against in the Turkish league. I’ve always been a basketball junkie, in love with the game since I was a little kid. I was always liked talking about basketball, I’ve always been a very social person, so I believe that this sport was in my blood for whatever reason. Johnny pointed out that I had all these qualities and that I should have considered becoming a scout after the end of my career and, to be honest, I was really enticed by that idea. I mean, going around the world and watching basketball games while you’re getting paid? That sounded like a dream job to me. Johnny helped me in learning the job, how to write reports, the things that I should have look for and stuff like that. The last year that I was playing as a pro, it was the 2015-2016 season, I felt like the game was slipping away from me. The coaching staff was asking me stuff that I wasn’t really good at it, they wanted me to be an athletic roller, but I’ve never been a particularly athletic player during my career. So, I felt like that brand of basketball wasn’t a good fit to me and when Johnny got hired by the Clippers as director of pro personnel, he told me “if you decide to stop playing and you want this job, it’s yours”. I jumped on a plane to LA, I met with the Clippers and I got the job. I started as a part-time consultant up until 2019 when I was promoted and became director of pro international personnel. In 2021 I moved to the US with my family and we’ve been there since”.
Q: “As a scout, which are the elements that you look the most for in a player? Are there specific traits that you wanna see in the prospects you scout?”
Ermal Kuqo: “Well, aside from the talent, we always look for a high-character type of players. They need to be smart, they have to be hard workers, team players. We always look for a playera who are going to put the team’s needs above their own. So the most important question every single time that we’re looking at a player is “how is he gonna fit with our team? How is he gonna adapt into our system?”. So on a scouting mission, you always look at the core elements: shooting, athleticism, how they move the ball, their bodies, their basketball IQ. But you also look for the little things: how they interact with their teammates, with their team managers, or with their coaches. It happened multiple times that I was asked what was the score of the game that I was looking for and I didn’t have any idea of the score because I was focused on watching the player that I was interested in being on the bench and acting like a child. I always want to look at their body language when their team is playing well but the guy is playing poorly. Are they supporting their teammates or they’re just being unhappy with the coach’s decision? Character is extremely important. At the end of the day, my bosses can use Synergy or any other video format that they have and watch the same game that I watched, they’re capable enough to evaluate a player. But they hire scouts because there are a lot of things that a camera doesn’t catch during a game, all the little personality issues and stuff, those are elements that you can catch only by watching the game being played in an arena or by acquiring information on the players, talking to the people who work with him or with his family”.