Virginia and Cleveland Cavalier Joe Harris is (almost) a record-setter

Today we saw Joe Harris, a second-round draft pick, had signed a deal with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Pretty minor stuff, but it reminded us that Joe Harris played for the Virginia Cavaliers, and hey, he’s on another team called the Cavaliers now. Neat! Cool! We hadn’t noticed that during the draft.

However, noticing it got us thinking: Is Harris the first of his type? After all, NBA teams tend to have unique nicknames -- Lakers, Clippers, Knicks, Celtics -- or at the very least nicknames that don’t correspond to college nicknames. So we (along with Seth Rosenthal) started checking Basketball-Reference to see if anybody crossed over:

- Nobody from the St. Joseph’s or Hartford Hawks has ever played for the Atlanta Hawks, or for that matter, the St. Louis or Milwaukee Hawks.

- Nobody from the South Florida or Buffalo Bulls has ever played for the Chicago Bulls.

- Nobody from the Toledo Rockets has ever played for the Houston Rockets

- Nobody from the Nebraska-Omaha or Texas-Arlington Mavericks has ever made the NBA, let alone played for the Dallas Mavericks

- No Delaware State, Alabama State, or Sacramento State Hornets have ever played for the Charlotte or New Orleans Hornets, and no Ohio or Quinnipiac Bobcats played for the Charlotte Bobcats while they existed.

- No Montana Grizzlies have ever played for the Vancouver or Memphis Grizzlies

With all the direct hits out of the way, we moved onto kinda connections:

- No UAB Blazers have ever played for the Portland Trail Blazers

- No Hawaii Rainbow Warriors have ever played for the Golden State Warriors

- No Oakland Golden Grizzlies have ever played for the Vancouver or Memphis Grizzlies

And we thought we were out of the woods!

However, we were not, as we forgot to look directly under our own noses. John Crotty and Bryant Stith had made the UVA-Cleveland leap in past, making Harris the third player to play for the same team name in college and the pros, all of them Cavaliers-to-Cavaliers.

So this was a way to waste our time! If you can think of any other college basketball-to-NBA team name scenarios we might have missed, please tell us, we are stupid. Also, we don’t know how the Elias Sports Bureau guys do this all day.