He has had an impressive start to this season's EuroCup, which has come after an interesting journey to this point
Hamburg playmaker Jaizec Lottie has risen higher after setbacks
Player Spotlight
11 Mins read
Nobody should be surprised if Jaizec Lottie bounces back from a tough stretch in a BKT EuroCup game to excel. The Veolia Towers Hamburg point guard has already gone through his share of trying times in his young career and come out on top.
The 26-year-old American is enjoying his debut season in the EuroCup and has already shown he belongs in the competition with averages of 11.7 points, 4.3 rebounds and 5.7 assists through three games, although Hamburg is rooted to the bottom of Group B with a 0-3 record.
“I think this league is an amazing league. It’s a very high-level league. It's going to be a very, very high competition,” Lottie tells David Hein. “The biggest step for us right now is being able to go up against a team like [FC Bayern] Munich and then two days later going up against Valencia [Basket] like we have. To have a quick turnaround we can't dwell on the past game, we can't think, ‘Oh we should have won this game.’ We have a game two or three days later.”
Lottie recalls a lesson from his mother. “My mom always tells me: Anything worth having doesn't come easy.”
Lottie’s journey to Hamburg and the EuroCup has certainly had its highs and lows.
The native of Aurora, Colorado, near Denver, had two solid years at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock before deciding to leave the program in his third year because of differences with his head coach.
Lottie had originally planned on transferring to the University of Denver back near home in Colorado. Shortly before the season was about to start, he learned that he in fact didn’t have a scholarship – leaving Lottie without a team.
He turned to his former Little Rock teammate Damir Hadzic, who had transferred the summer before to Flagler College – a Division II program in Florida. The Bosnia and Herzegovina native talked to his Flagler coach, who immediately jumped at the opportunity to get such a high-level guard.
“It ended up being probably the best two years of my life,” comments Lottie, who guided the team to the NCAA Division II Final Four in 2021 and was named an NCAA Division II All-American in both 2021 and 2022.
Before Lottie arrived, Flagler had suffered through 12 consecutive losing seasons.
From Flagler in St Augustine, Florida, Lottie started his professional career in 2022 in Switzerland with BBC Monthey, where he was the third-highest scorer in the league with 20.1 points to go with 4.1 rebounds and 5.0 assists.
Lottie grew up close to the Rocky Mountains, but they were about an hour away; not like the Alps, which were right on his doorstep in Monthey. But his family was very far away, and the family-orientated Lottie struggled with not being able to talk to his younger sister regularly because of the time difference.
The current Hamburg guard instead became very close to his Monthey teammates, living with three of them and developing a strong bond, which still holds today.
Lottie also learned a lot from two of his other teammates – the then 34-year-old Markel Humphrey and 36-year-old Kevin Langford, who is the brother of former Turkish Airlines EuroLeague star Keith Langford. Both were playing their 14th season in Europe and were even older than the team’s head coach, Patrick Pembele.
“Kevin was more of like a quiet leader. But anytime that he saw something that I wasn't doing right, or he saw something that I could do better, he would always pull me aside. And I was all ears,” Lottie says. “When you have guys like that who have played at the highest level, and his brother's obviously a EuroLeague star, you just want to listen. You want to soak in everything, so I was like a sponge.
“Markel was big for me because he takes such good care of his body and he’s still playing at such a high level at such an old age to where I was able to pick his brain about that. And both of them were really cool. Neither one of them would shy away from talking to me. They would try to give me all the knowledge they can. So, to have those two vets my first year was very important."
Lottie learned the business of basketball in Europe last season. He made the jump from Switzerland to Italian League team Scafati. But just four games into the season, the club released him and signed Latvian veteran Janis Strelnieks.
“I think with that whole situation, I was ready for the jump. I just don't think I was put in a position where I was given a chance to really learn and grow,” he notes. “Because obviously when you make that jump, you need time to go with the grooves instead of against the grooves. And I felt like I wasn't really put in a position for that.”
Before coming to Scafati, Strelnieks had been practicing with Latvian club VEF Riga. Lottie talked to the veteran about Riga’s coach and the American ended up signing with VEF last November.
Lottie excelled in the Latvian capital, averaging 14.3 points and 5.3 assists in the Latvian-Estonian League to go with 10.1 points and 4.0 assists in the Latvian League and 9.8 points and 3.3 assists in the Basketball Champions League.
“I think [Scafati] getting rid of me and sending me to Riga was the best thing for me because I was under a coach that put so much time into the game,” he says after helping VEF win the Latvian league and cup double and reach the Latvian-Estonian League semifinals. “He really helped me understand how to play the European game as a point guard, how to slow down, how to do certain things.
“I'm very grateful for it. It was a blessing in disguise that I moved there – and I got a championship and a cup out of it, which is really cool, too.”
Just another tough situation that Jaizec Lottie turned into a success.