Ryan Daly’s playing career is ending, but he is far from done with basketball

You ask Ryan Daly for a tipping point, a time when Daly really started to think seriously about retiring from competitive basketball, one year into his professional career, the former St. Joseph’s Hawks star kind of laughs.

The last months of his basketball life offer a whole big tale, all worth telling. If it all headed in the same direction, Daly made clear, none of it seemed like a straight line.

“Like a bag in the wind,” is how Daly described himself during this 2021-22 basketball season, with all sorts of professional stops, except most of them meant stopped in a hotel room.

At one point, Daly said, “I hadn’t touched a ball in six weeks and I was signed [the whole time] in the G League.”

Usually, he was quarantined because someone on his team or the opponent had tested positive for COVID-19.

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“Then I pop positive,” Daly said of the time just after Christmas when he was in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., with the Agua Caliente Clippers G League team.

The details all led to the conclusion that Daly was ready to hang it up. Consider this weekend the start of a little farewell tour, playing for a Big 5 alumni team in The Basketball Tournament, with a game Saturday at New York’s fabled Rucker Park.

“Last hurrah for my parents and the people who supported me the whole time,” Daly said. “Plus, it’s at Rucker. Not a bad way to end my competitive career.”

Next stop, already in progress. Last week, Daly was at a recruiting event, wearing a University of Albany shirt. He already has begun up there, joining the staff of head coach Dwayne Killings as director of player development and special assistant to the head coach. Killings, the former Temple assistant, has known Ryan since Killings was on Pat Chambers’ staff at Boston University, where Ryan’s father, Brian, was an assistant.

“He used to call me ‘Pudding’ because I was soft and pudgy in seventh grade,” Daly said of Killings. But Killings now says he’s been amazed by what kind of basketball player that kid turned into, leading the Atlantic 10 in scoring in 2019-20, averaging 18 points a game over his four seasons at Delaware and St. Joseph’s.

“Once I knew I was done, I kind of got the word out, looking to be in the game,” Daly said over the phone this week from Albany. “I missed being in the gym so much.”

Had he considered playing professionally overseas?

“I had a few opportunities,” Daly said. “A team in New Zealand, one in Belgium. Truthfully, I’m a homebody, and not only a homebody -- a comfortable body. I need to be comfortable to be productive.”

That didn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows Daly. He could have started at the bottom ladder overseas, he said, and maybe been in the top tier EuroLeague after four years or so. “I wasn’t ready for the part trying to get there — being by myself for 10 months a year.”

This past year offered all the perspective he could want. He played in the NBA Summer League last year for the Chicago Bulls, then was drafted by the Detroit Pistons’ G League team.

“I’d been waived in Detroit, ended up with the Clippers and Celtics,” Daly said, meaning their G League teams, close enough to see the NBA, but also see how much talent was in the G League fighting for every minute of time.

He remembers leaving home in Havertown the morning after Christmas, heading for the West Coast.

“First trip to California,” Daly said of joining the Clippers team coached by former Villanova assistant Paul Hewitt, whom Daly called “a really good dude.”

COVID seemed to follow Daly around.

“I’d bounced around — Detroit training camp, the Raptors — they got COVID,” Daly said. “I went to Chicago in mid-November, four weeks there in quarantine. Everyone kept testing positive, but I never did. I missed Thanksgiving, locked away [in a hotel.] One game, we showed up to the gym, they told us it was canceled because three guys had tested positive. We were supposed to play three games, then go to Las Vegas [for the G League Showcase]; we never got off the ground.”

This was mid-December.

“All right, I’m going to go home,” Daly said.

Except his agent got a call from the G League commissioner, telling him a couple of teams were interested in Daly. He flew to Vegas. He played one day for the Celtics’ team, the next for the Clippers’ squad.

“I play well for the Clippers, they sign me for the foreseeable future,” Daly said.

That’s when his own COVID adventure began, after that day-after-Christmas flight.

“Back to quarantine, through New Year’s Eve, my birthday on the sixth. Man, I rang up Door Dash crazier than anyone. Sometimes it was healthy, sometimes it was Chick-fil-A when I was feeling sorry for myself.”

No basketball for him, until he finally cleared protocol. Then he got a call. He was being waived. Kris Dunn was available.

“I was like, no-brainer — he was drafted fifth in the [2016] NBA draft,” Daly said. “I’d have done the same thing.”

Dunn played there until he was picked up a month later by the Portland Trail Blazers. For Daly, there were some calls later in the season from the G League “about latching on for a playoff run.”

Home at the time, Daly said he didn’t go out in public too much, even to college games, knowing he’d naturally get a lot of questions — “people were like, why aren’t you playing?”

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In his mind, Daly already was moving on.

“I did some soul-searching,” Daly said. “As much as I love basketball and competing, the [previous] three months had taken such a toll. I didn’t have the energy to do it. I spent two weeks in four different cities without ever touching a basketball. I don’t know if that’s ever happened to anybody.”

This next phase has him excited, ready to pass on his own experiences.

“Underrated kid — I never played in the NBA, but I got close to it,” Daly said. “G League, Summer League. Players [at Albany], a lot knew me. They know this guy doesn’t have explosive athleticism, he’s not tall, but he had a pretty good career.”

Killings still sees the chip on Daly’s shoulder, under-recruited out of Archbishop Carroll despite being Catholic League MVP. He loves that part of him.

“He knows so much about the game, what is going on in the NBA, in college,” Killings said. “We talk about liking basketball, or loving it, or living it. He lives it through and through.”

At the same time, Killings said, Daly doesn’t take himself too seriously.

“I just want him around,” Killings said of creating a role for him.

“I don’t think he’ll be here more than a year,” Killings added. “How this business goes, you need an opportunity to get that opportunity.”

However this next year plays out, it probably can’t match 2021-22 for tales Daly can always tell. Even as he felt like that bag in the wind, his feeling for basketball was only reinforced.

“I won’t survive without it,” Daly said.