"This fills me with happiness": Ex-Raptors guard wins Italian league MVP at age 38
Though it’s been nearly 15 years since he played with the Toronto Raptors, Marco Belinelli hasn’t stopped hooping.
And despite being older than all but five active NBA players, he’s still found his way to dominate in his home country.
This week, the 38-year-old Belinelli was named MVP in the top Italian pro league, some four years after his last NBA game.
The award was voted on by many parties: managers, coaches, players, the media, a community panel, and fans.
Playing for Virtus Segafredo Bologna, Belinelli won what was a clearly a widely split award, taking the top honours with just 14.7 percent of the vote.
“Definitely it is something beautiful,” Belinelli said in a release. “Until now it never happened to me to be MVP of the Italian championship and this fills me with happiness. However, it is not only thanks to me but to the team, my teammates, the technical staff, the medical staff, the physiotherapists and of course the [people in town]. I thank everyone who voted for me, but now we have something much more important to win on court as a club and we will try to do it.”
Belinelli averaged 13.9 points per game while shooting 41.2% from three and 90.9% from free throws, adding 2.1 assists per game. Bologna ranked top in the league, going 22-8 in the regular season.
Belinelli averaged 7.1 points, 1.4 rebounds, and 1.3 assists in 66 games for the Raptors in his career, all of which came in the 2009-10 season. His career officially counts as the “journeyman” category, having played for nine NBA teams over the course of his career. He last played on the San Antonio Spurs in 2019-20, playing 57 games that season, and has been playing in Bologna ever since.
He averaged 9.7 points and 2.1 rebounds in 860 regular-season games but was perhaps best known as a key bench player in the Spurs’ 2014 NBA title run.
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