Givova Scafati announces the agreement with the American athlete Robert Dejuan Gray jr., a 30-year-old combo-guard with a remarkable CV in the international field and gifted with boundless talent, enormous dynamism and leadership. «I am extremely grateful to the club for the opportunity granted to me and at the same time excited to play next season in Italy. I can’t wait to get to Scafati and get to work; we will have a great year”, his words. While the patron Lombards he adds: «We wanted the first market coup to be a very high level signing, Rob is a player on whom we have invested a lot and who we know has the necessary qualities to be decisive, his career tells us this. We are on the right path to be competitive in a championship that promises to be increasingly difficult, now we continue to work to build the best team possible.”
THE PROFILE – A deadly attacker in 1vs1 situations, Rob is a 185cm, 82kg scoring guard capable of creating advantageous solutions in the offensive half of the field for himself and his teammates. Born in 1994, the Carolinian (native of Forest City) established himself in basketball overseas, more precisely at the University of Houston wearing the Cougars jersey. In the three-year period 2015-18 in the NCAA he averaged 18.6 points in over 90 official games, shooting 36% from three-point range. After not being selected in the 2018 NBA Draft, Gray joined the Indiana Mad Ants in the G-League, where he recorded his career-high number of points scored in a game (46) and gained the attention of the major European leagues . In March 2019 he signed his first contract away from the United States, in Bourg-en-Bresse, France, where he collected 14 points, 3.8 rebounds and 3.9 assists in just 10 games. Hexagone remains amazed by the impact of the American tightrope walker on the championship, so much so that they managed to confirm him in LNB (French Serie A) first in the Boulogne-Levallois shirt (14.5 points on average with over 50% from two and 40% from three points) and then, in 2020-21 and the following season, with the renowned AS Monaco team. With the Monegasques he reached the highest peaks of his career: he won the 2021 EuroCup as MVP (24 points on average against Unics Kazan in the final series of the tournament) and played in the Euroleague a few months later. In the summer of 2022 he signs with Tofas Bursa; in Turkey he stands out thanks to 18.2 points per game (37 in the victory against Fenerbahce his European record) in the league and 22.5 in the Basketball Champions League. Last season in which he flew to Prometey (Ukraine) where he scored 12.9 points in just 19 minutes of use, but after the elimination in the quarter-finals of the EuroCup he decided to move to Breogan, in Spain, to close the 2023 season/ 24.
