Former Tall Black, NBA player and current GM of the Brooklyn Nets Sean Marks is tonight awarded Legend status.
Sean’s early basketball playing days were on Auckland’s North Shore where he attended Rangitoto College.
Following high school he headed to the States in 1994 on a 4-year scholarship at the University of California Berkeley and has been immersed in the game ever since. The 1997 team went all the way to the Sweet 16 at the NCAA Tournament. In the same year Sean was named the Outstanding Student Athlete on the Men’s Basketball Team at Cal Berkeley.
In the 1998 NBA draft Sean was initially drafted by the New York Knicks, but went on to play for the Toronto Raptors thus becoming the first New Zealand-born player to play in the NBA . Between 1998 until his retirement from playing in 2011, he also played for the Miami Heat, San Antonio Spurs, Phoenix Suns, New Orleans Hornets and the Portland Trail Blazers. He also had a brief stint playing in Poland between 2000 and 2001.
Upon retirement from the game he took up a position in 2012 as Director of Basketball for the Spurs, and a year later became Assistant Coach for the team. In 2015 he returned to the front office becoming Assistant General Manager of the Spurs. Sean is currently General Manager for the Brooklyn Nets, a position he has held since 2016. The Nets play out of the Barclays Centre in New York which has a seating capacity of 20,000 with Sean overseeing a budget in excess of $150million for players alone!
Career highlights include doing the double with the Spurs. As a player he won the 2005 NBA Championship then in 2014 another championship was claimed while Sean was Assistant Coach.
He played 33 games for the Tall Blacks attending both the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the 2004 Athens Olympics, and was part of the Tall Blacks team that finished fourth at the 2002 FIBA World Championships held in Indianapolis, USA.
That team was named New Zealand’s team of the year and overall winners of the Halberg Awards in 2002 and only last year was inducted into the New Zealand Basketball Hall of Fame.
Sean himself was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2017 and is without doubt a deserving recipient of Legend status this year.
Accepting this award on Sean’s behalf is his very proud father, Greg Marks.
