by Will Jones
Sudanese players have been known to American fans of professional basketball since Manute Bol played for the Washington Bullets and other NBA teams. More recently fans saw Luol Ajou Deng retire from the Minnesota Timberwolves and coach a South Sudanese national team who almost upset the American team in a pre-Paris Olympics match. Now drawing the attention of National Basketball Association recruiters is the youngest player on that South Sudanese team, Khaman Maluach.
Born in 2006 in Rumbek, South Sudan, Maluach spent most of his childhood in a refugee camp in Kawempe, Uganda. A passing boda-boda driver, seeing how much taller Maluach was than his 13-year-old friends, encouraged him to start playing basketball. This began a journey which led him to Senegal, where the NBA has an academy in Saly, and an education.
At 7’ 2”, Maluach was the top center in the 2024 recruiting class, receiving offers from Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, and UCLA. Committing to Duke, and receiving an estimated $1 million from name-image-likeness deals, he has been paired with the Blue Devils’ top recruit Cooper Flagg. Should Maluach be chosen in the upcoming NBA draft, he would be the first NBA player to come out of the NBA Academy Africa.
I recently watched the Duke-Notre Dame game, where Flagg recorded a Duke freshman record 42 points, while Maluach had 19 points and 10 rebounds. He recorded another double-double this season against Miami. I hope he’ll carry on the tradition of Sudanese and South Sudanese basketball players finding success abroad — and bringing some of their money and talent back home with them.