Know Your Team: Quinnel Brown
Quinnel Brown
Windsor Express
6'6
Forward
From Chicago
2xNBLC Champion
2015 MVP
2xAll-NBLC
The game of basketball has taken Quinnel Brown on a long journey to many places, but something special seems to happen when he plays in the NBL Canada, the league he has seen his biggest successes and best results.
After two seasons with the Wabash Valley Warriors, reaching fourth place in the NJCAA Tournament in his first, he we recruited to the Auburn Tigers in the NCAA. He would be named team Defensive Player of the Year in his first season and started in all 31 games in his second. He finished at Auburn with 10.0 average points and 4.5 rebounds.
His professional career began in 2005 when he signed with KTP in Finland, later leaving them for the Sundsvall Dragons in Sweden, with whom he won an SBL All-Star selection. He returned home the following season to play for the Twin City Ballers in the ABA. He went on to play for three more American minor-league teams: Detroit Panthers and Quad City Riverhakws of the PBL and the Gary Steelheads in the IBL.
In 2008 he returned to Scandinavia, joining Kataja in Finland, averaging 14.0 points and 5.9 rebounds in 43 games for the team. The next season he played three games for Fribourg Olympic in Switzerland before moving back to the IBL, finishing the season with the USA All-Stars.
In January 2011 he signed with the Quebec Kebs, then part of Premier League Basketball. He achieved career-highs of 22.3 points, 8.3 rebounds and 3.0 blocks per game. His numbers earned him the 2011-12 MVP award, but the Kebs fell short of the championship after a semi-final defeat to the Rochester Razrosharks.
After a brief interlude in the IBL with the Edmonton Energy, he joined the Cuxhaven BasCasts in Germany, playing 18 games and recording averages of 14.6 points and 5.9 rebounds before being sidelined by an injury.
Upon recovery, Brown re-joined the Quebec Kebs, now in the newly-formed NBL Canada. He played seven games in the league's first season and remained in Canada the following year, this time playing for the Halifax Rainmen. He was named to the All-NBLC second team after averaging 14.8 points, 6.6 rebounds and 2.0 assists per game, numbers he would build on the following season with the Windsor Express.
Playing for Windsor in 2013-14, he averaged 15.8 points, 7.1 rebounds and 2.5 assists as the Express would go on to win their first NBLC championship. Brown stayed with the Express the following season and posted career-best results: 20.5 points, 6.3 rebounds and 3.6 assists in 46 games - numbers which earned him All-NBLC first team and league MVP honours. His efforts also helped Windsor repeat their championship run, capturing their second NBL Canada title at the season's end.
2016 saw Brown move on to Gigantes in Venezuela, for whom he started in every game his first season and finished with averages of 15.8 points and 5.5 rebounds. Gigantes performance earned them a place in the Liga Sudamericana the following year, but were eliminated in the group stage. Brown played 35 regular season games for Gigantes in the 2016-17 season and was named to the league second team.
From then on he stayed in South America, splitting 2017-18 with Gigantes and Salta Basket in Argentina, then spending the following season with Larre Borges in Uruguay. In thirty games he averaged 15.7 points, 5.0 rebounds and 2.3 assists for Borges and helped them reach the LUB semi-finals.
Brown then once again re-joined the Windsor Express in 2020, playing eleven games - starting in seven - but averaging 19.7 points, 5.5 rebounds and 2.7 assists before the season came to early end. The results from this NBLC season show that time has done nothing to Quinnel Brown's basketball abilities. He is still a dependable all-around player more than a decade after turning professional - something particularly true whenever he has taken to the NBL Canada courts.
