P.J. Tucker announces retirement after NBA career spanning 19 seasons
P. J. Tucker played 83 NBA minutes in his rookie season.
He ended up playing more than 3,000 minutes in the playoffs.
P. J. Tucker was never an NBA All-Star, but he started on some pretty good teams over the course of a professional basketball career spanning two decades.
That career officially ended on Thursday, with Tucker announcing his retirement on Instagram. View this post on Instagram The 41-year-old Tucker ended up playing for eight different NBA teams, winning an NBA title with the 2020-21 Milwaukee Bucks. He last played for the New York Knicks last season, going unsigned after New York declined his team option for 2025-26.
It took a long time for Tucker, notably undersized as a 6-foot-5 forward, to find anything resembling NBA success. He was a second-round draft pick out of Texas for the Toronto Raptors in 2006 and played sparingly as a rookie, spending more time in the D-League. After getting waived and failing to find an NBA home, Tucker spent the next five seasons playing internationally for teams in Israel, Ukraine, Greece, Italy and Germany.