Good job Connor Wood's parents kept his bedroom at the family home.
Wood, a former basketball standout on the Guelph high school and club scene, has joined the Guelph Nighthawks pro basketball team for the remainder of the season after finishing up his commitments with pro teams in Germany and France.
"It's going to be good to have some fun, keep in shape and play with this team. It's a good group of guys," Wood, 26, said Thursday after practice at the University of Guelph.
Wood will make his debut Saturday when the Nighthawks host the Hamilton Honey Badgers. It will be the first time he has represented a Guelph team since his Guelph Phoenix club days as a teenager. He played Grade 9 and 10 at Bishop Mac before moving to a prep school.
Wood said that it will be great "actually playing games and getting better" as opposed to the usual summer routine of working out and scrimmaging with friends either in Guelph or back in Ottawa with some of his old Carleton Ravens university teammates.
Guelph currently sits in fifth place in the six-team Canadian Elite Basketball League with a 3-6 record.
"I've watched a couple of games online," he said of what he knows about his new team.
"We need to focus on defence and getting stops. At Carleton it was defence, defence, defence."
Good defence, Wood said, leads to good offence.
Wood spent five years with the Ravens, from 2013-2017, winning the CIS championship in each of those years. In 2016 Wood was awarded the CIS Tournament MVP and in 2017 was CIS Player of the Year.
He played for Canada at the World University Games, averaging 14.0 points a game.
In 2018, Wood signed with the Paderborn Baskets of the ProA second-tier league in Germany where he appeared in 28 games for the club while averaging 12.7 points.
Nighthawks coach Tarry Upshaw hopes Wood brings more than good defence.
"He's a pro," Upshaw said of Wood, who he has known and coached since he was a teenager.
"He's a guy who can really, really shoot the ball and spread the floor. He's going to give our big guys way more space to play," Upshaw said, adding that the lack of a consistent three-point shooter has been the reason other teams have been double teaming the Nighthawks' big men down low.
"The guys will respond to him. They'll feed off him," Upshaw said of Wood.
The second half of the season we want to flip our record around and make it to the final four (playoffs)."
Wood isn't sure if he's going back to Germany next season. European imports are typically on one-year contracts.
"I'll see what my agent comes up with," he said.
