PHILADELPHIA – Former Nittany Lion D.J. Newbill is on the roster for the Philadelphia-area-based Brotherly Love team participating in the 2020 The Basketball Tournament (TBT). Games begin on Saturday, July 4, with a Brotherly Love playing the Stillwater Stars at 5 p.m. ET on ESPN.
From Philadelphia, Newbill was named the 2020 Defensive Player of the Year for the National Basketball League (NBL) in his second year with the Cairns Taipans and was an all-NBL second-team pick. Co-captain of the Taipans, the 6-4 guard helped lead the team to the NBL semifinals and a third-place finish for the 2019-20 regular season.
Newbill produced 1,812 points in his three years (2012-2015) at Penn State to rank fourth on Penn State's career scoring list following his final collegiate season. A two-time All-Big Ten selection as a junior and senior, his 18.3 points-per-game career scoring average is second only to Nittany Lion great Jesse Arnelle.
The bracket for the $1 million winner-take-all tournament is available here: (LINK: http://thetournament.com/news/tbt-releases-2020-teams-and-bracket.) The 24-team schedule of games is being played under quarantine at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. All 23 games of the single-elimination tournament will be available on the ESPN family of networks.
Newbill is the only Penn Stater playing in this year's tournament and joined the 12-man roster for Brotherly Love in June.
Newbill became the third PSU player all-time to produce back-to-back 600-plus point campaigns and, at the end of his senior season, was just the second PSU player with three-consecutive 500-plus point seasons. At the time, his senior year point total (704) trailed only Arnelle on the single-season records list.
Including his freshman season at Southern Mississippi, Newbill had 2,105 career points and in 2014-15, he was the only active Big Ten player to pass that mark, and one of just nine other active Division I players to reach that milestone.
Saturday's lineup of games, the first live-televised basketball games on American soil since March 12, begins at 3 p.m. ET. The 12th-seeded Brotherly Love team faces the 21st-seeded Stillwater Stars team in the second game of the day. TBT games also will be streamed live and on-demand via the ESPN Player to more than 135 countries throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
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