Nik Caner-Medley may be a budding entrepreneur, but he’s not ready to retire from pro basketball just yet.
On Friday morning, seated at a conference table inside Cloudport – the co-working space on Federal Street he helped develop – the former Deering High star signed a two-year contract to play professional basketball for Movistar Estudiantes in Madrid, Spain.
Caner-Medley, who turns 34 in October, recently completed a one-year deal with AS Monaco, where his team won the Leaders Cup title in France and reached the semifinals of the European Champions League.
“For first time in their history, their basketball team and their soccer team went to the Final Four of the Champions League, so it was really big,” Caner-Medley said. “The prince (of Monaco) came to a bunch of our games, which was really cool.”
The team in Madrid is familiar to the 6-foot-8 power forward, who played there from 2009 to 2011. His last season in Madrid was the last time Estudiantes reached the playoffs.
“The savior is back,” joked Josh Corbeau, his friend and business partner.
Terms of the deal were not announced, but Caner-Medley said it was guaranteed, lucrative and that “I didn’t take a step backwards.”
Since graduating from the University of Maryland, Caner-Medley has played 11 seasons overseas, except for a few months in the NBA Development League in 2007. Just before to playing in Monaco, he fulfilled a two-year $2 million contract in Kazakhstan.
He plans to get married in July 2018 and speaks of expanding his real estate development business. Cloudport opened six months ago and already has 140 members.
“It’s a really exciting time,” he said. “Here at Cloudport it’s something that’s new for me, it’s a passion that I’ve found outside of basketball, but I still love the game and I’m by no means in a hurry to stop playing. I want to play as long as I possibly can.”
Caner-Medley said he usually waits until July before signing as a free agent, but that Madrid approached him right after his season in Monaco with the offer of a guaranteed contract.
“To have this security is a weight off my shoulders,” he said, “knowing that for the next couple years I can really focus on continuing to take care of myself, enjoying the game, and then also continue to take steps for life after basketball, which I’ve taken really seriously.”
Glenn Jordan can be contacted at 791-6425 or
Twitter: GlennJordanPPH
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