Meet Khaman Maluach, the 7-foot-2 NBA Draft Prospect Who Wants to 'Change the Game'

INDIANAPOLIS — Khaman Maluach is a 7-foot-2 center who shoots 3s, dribbles between his legs, blocks shots and is unstoppable at the rim at age 17.

If his size and skill set sound familiar, well, Maluach thinks he is not done growing. “A little bit, maybe 2 inches,” he said, which would put him at the same height as the 2023 No. 1 NBA draft pick, Victor Wembanyama.

On Wednesday, Maluach, who lives in Senegal and joined NBA Academy Africa, picked Duke over fellow finalists Kansas, Kentucky and UCLA, as well as offers from the NBA G-League Ignite and Australia’s NBL Rising Stars program.

He is projected to be a high lottery pick in the 2025 draft — maybe even No. 1, because, again, he is about as tall as and can do many of the same things as Wembanyama.

But even if Maluach never makes it to college, if he were to be passed over in the draft entirely, he would have lived a remarkable life with some unfathomable accomplishments.

He fled war-torn South Sudan with his mother and brothers at a young age and moved to Uganda, where he lived until the NBA’s African scouts noticed him at 14 years old and recommended him for the year-round NBA academy in Saly, Senegal, on the continent’s Atlantic coast. He fought his way onto the South Sudan men’s basketball national team at age 16 and became the third-youngest player to compete in a FIBA World Cup last summer.

And when the South Sudanese beat Angola in their final game at the World Cup in the Philippines in September, Maluach was a member of the first team from that small, young, Central African country to qualify for the Olympics.

So when Maluach is asked about what’s coming next, the teenager shrugs as if he is wise well beyond his years.

“I don’t think about it much because I always try to be where my feet are,” he said.

Maluach was born in 2006, five years before South Sudan gained its independence from Sudan after decades of war. In 2013, civil war broke out in South Sudan, a country of about 12 million people, that left nearly 400,000 casualties and more than 4 million people displaced, according to a 2023 report by The Associated Press.

Maluach said he was too young to remember South Sudan before he left, and he never experienced war personally. He said his father stayed behind to work, while he, his mother and brothers lived with family members in a neighborhood of Uganda’s capital city, Kampala. He grew up there playing soccer.

He was about 6-foot-7 by the time he was invited to watch a basketball camp hosted by NBA veteran Luol Deng, who, like Maluach, was born in Sudan.

“Where I am from, not everybody’s tall as me,” Maluach said. “Suddenly, I just see people taller than me, and I was like, ‘Wow, there actually are people taller than me on this planet.’ I feel like I just belong there because nobody was surprised about my height.”

He remembers going home from camp one day and pulling up videos of Giannis Antetokounmpo on his cousin’s phone.

“He inspired me,” Maluach said of Antetokounmpo and those YouTube videos. “That’s when I thought about it and really loved the game.”

The lone basketball court where Maluach lived wasn’t close, a walk of 45 minutes to an hour. But after watching those basketball videos and dribbling at home, he began making that walk every day, he said, and friends and coaches taught him the rules of the game.

The three things threatening Maluach’s daily games were the weather (if it rained or was too hot), the scarcity of basketballs and a lack of shoes. Already a size 14 by age 13, Maluach said, he played his first game in a pair of Crocs.

“Size 14 in Uganda? You can’t find it anywhere,” he said. Friends who were in America would bring shoes home with them for him to wear, he said, “And then I used them for a whole year.”

Self-taught from watching YouTube clips of not just Antetokounmpo but other NBA stars such as Joel Embiid and Kevin Durant, and with that tantalizing size, Maluach earned a scholarship to a Ugandan private high school. He enrolled in January 2020 and got to stay for about two months before COVID struck.

Back at home on lockdown, Maluach said he stacked together two or three large tires, reaching about 10 feet, and shot his one basketball through the top tire every day. He placed stones under the bottom tire so the ball rolled back to him after a make.

Maluach shot at those tires and worked on his handle at home for a year before the NBA scouts recommended him for the academy in Saly.

Since 2017, the NBA has operated four year-round academies in Senegal, Australia, India and Mexico. The NBA’s expansive network of global scouts identify the top teenagers from those regions, and they are flown, fed, clothed (by Nike), schooled in an American education curriculum and taught to speak English, counseled and otherwise coached in basketball around the clock, all funded by the NBA.

Dozens of graduates have gone on to play at NCAA Division I schools; a handful are currently in the G League, and four — Oklahoma City’s Josh Giddey, New Orleans’ Dyson Daniels, Indiana’s Bennedict Mathurin and Portland’s Ibou Badji — are on NBA rosters. Badji, like Maluach, attended the Academy in Senegal.

During the time of his enrollment, Maluach, at age 14 1/2, was the youngest player ever at an NBA Academy school. It is 4,600 miles from Maluach’s home in Uganda.

“They took my worries away,” Maluach said of the academy. “I had everything close to me. I had the basketball court; like, I just walked three minutes, two minutes, to go there. I have shoes. We have so many balls in the gym. We have coaches. We have strength and conditioning coaches.

“I had no excuse to be like, ‘You don’t work hard.’ ”

NBA officials who have watched Maluach at the academy marvel at his work ethic, his ability to accept constructive criticism and his insatiable desire to commit to memory every modicum of instruction.

While Maluach was toiling at the academy in Saly, the South Sudan men’s national team went to Senegal to practice and play in a FIBA World Cup qualifier. Maluach was one of the last players added to the roster, just before the World Cup in the Philippines. When the South Sudanese defeated Angola, they finished first among African teams at the Cup, which meant a berth to the Paris Olympics. Maluach appeared in four games in the tournament, averaging 2.0 points and 3.8 rebounds in 10 minutes per contest.

South Sudan has been announced as a pre-Olympic opponent for the U.S. team, with an exhibition game scheduled for London in July. It means Maluach will get his first chance to play against the American greats he emulates from YouTube.

Maluach said he deserved the attention he had recently received, primarily because of “all the work I’ve put in.” He said that when he contemplates his future, he thinks of “how I’m going to impact the league, how I’m going to change the game, or how great I’m going to be.”

Franck Traore, head of basketball operations for NBA Africa, said much was riding on how far Maluach’s head and feet take him.

“Khaman represents what NBA Africa is trying to be,” Traore said. “Being able to develop young people, young men and women, just like him to learn to play the game at a young age and develop to become elite — all on the continent. He’s a product of the continent, pure product of the continent, and that shows the commitment of the NBA to really use the power of the game to uplift the youth on the continent.

“He’s a trailblazer, and everybody is proud of it.”