Malik Dia's path to the NBA didn't run through the lottery green room. He went undrafted this year, but that didn't stop the Pelicans from locking him up anyway. According to Shams Charania, New Orleans is signing the forward to a two-way deal after he averaged 10 points and 5.8 rebounds for the team in July's summer league.
The New Orleans Pelicans are signing F Malik Dia to a two-way NBA deal, sources tell ESPN. Undrafted out of Ole Miss, Dia averaged 10 points and 5.8 rebounds for the Pelicans in summer league in July.
For anyone who followed college hoops this past March, Dia's name should ring a bell. He didn't start his career at Ole Miss, or even at a mid-major. Dia began at Vanderbilt, barely played as a freshman, and wasn't brought back for year 2. He rebuilt himself at Belmont, averaging nearly 17 points a game in under 25 minutes and earning third-team All-MVC honors, before landing at Ole Miss under Chris Beard.
The version of Dia that showed up in Oxford was a slow starter — double figures in just one of his first 12 games — before he caught fire in SEC play. He helped power Ole Miss to the Sweet 16, and in the round-of-32 win over Iowa State he dropped 18 points and grabbed 8 boards. Two transfers and a coaching change later, that's the resume that got him into an NBA summer league jersey.
A two-way deal isn't a guaranteed roster spot — it caps players at 50 NBA games a season, pays roughly half the rookie minimum, and keeps them shuttling to the G League — but it's a real foot in the door. For a guy who wasn't drafted and had already been cut loose once in college, it's the kind of opportunity that turns into a standard contract if he keeps producing.
The Pelicans clearly liked what they saw over those July summer league minutes enough to bet on him now rather than wait and risk losing him elsewhere. New Orleans' frontcourt depth has been a question mark, and a two-way big who can rebound and score inside gives them a low-cost look at whether Dia's summer league numbers translate once camp opens.
There's no ceremony to a two-way signing — no press conference, no franchise-altering headline. But for a player who bounced from Vanderbilt to Belmont to Ole Miss just trying to find a home, getting his name in a Shams tweet is the whole point. Now it's on Dia to make himself impossible to option off that two-way deal.