Rasual Butler, Cuttino Mobley recapture a slice of their careers in hometown Philly

Rasual Butler does not just miss basketball. He longs for the bus rides and the shootaround sessions, the locker rooms and the crowds, the teammates and the opponents.

A graduate of Roman Catholic and La Salle, Butler has not been a consistent NBA starter in seven years and has not played at all in 16 months. But the league gave him more than minutes.

Butler is 38. He has never averaged more than a dozen points in a season. His agent is letting teams know that he is still interested in playing, but he will likely never again take the court in a sold-out arena.

For now, the BIG3 — the new professional three-on-three basketball league that stopped at the Wells Fargo Center on Sunday — can provide some of that excitement. The games draw decent crowds. Celebrities are around. The locker rooms show games on TV.

"It's cool to feel that again," Butler said. "Obviously it's not the NBA. It's not the highest level. But it's familiar faces around that give you that feeling."

The South Philly native scored 2,125 points for La Salle from 1998 to 2002. He played 13 seasons in the NBA, played in the D-League for the 2012-13 season, then revived his NBA career for three more years. After the San Antonio Spurs waived him in March 2016, the Minnesota Timberwolves had him under contract for a month last fall, and then the calls stopped coming.

Most of the BIG3 league is in the same position. Al Harrington said he thought he was done playing basketball. Jermaine O'Neal, after he completed his postgame news conference Sunday, stood and winced, "Oh, sweet Jesus." Cuttino Mobley, who attended Cardinal Dougherty in the early 1990s, returned to his hometown with a graying beard.

After leading his three-on-three team to its third victory in four weeks, Mobley said a sentence he could have used hundreds of times during his career — "I'm just happy we pulled it out" — before adding a detail that speaks to life in the BIG3: "I just got off the plane this morning."

The NBA dwarfs the BIG3 in glamour, popularity, and stakes. The BIG3 games are shorter. They are televised on tape delay. They are more a show than anything — Allen Iverson didn't even end up playing Sunday.

But it is still basketball.

"Listen, if I get to play basketball, I'm always excited," Mobley said. "Of course, you love to play at home, to see your old friends and different people you grew up around."

The end of Mobley's career was more tumultuous than most. In 2008, doctors diagnosed  hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a heart abnormality, forcing Mobley to retire soon after a trade to the New York Knicks. In 2011, Mobley sued the Knicks,  claiming a misdiagnosis ended his career prematurely. In 2013, the Olney native dropped the suit in hopes of joining a team again.

Four years later, he has finally done that, in a way.

The perks are there. Fans shower 40-somethings with admiration. Players such as Butler and Mobley take trips home. The retired men reconnect with friends they haven't seen in years.

"He got a light-skinned bullet-proof vest on him," Mobley quipped about ex-teammate Mike Bibby. Rashad McCants playfully trumpeted the new Big Baller Brand after his game. For Butler, the fun goes all the way back to the pregame bus ride.

"To be able to have that again," Butler said, "I think it's exciting for us all."