YouTube Gold: The Khaman Maluach Story

An improbable star is rising

Khaman Maluach is one of the more interesting players to come through Duke in a very long time.

He’s obviously talented and from all accounts he has a highly engaging personality. His teammates have described someone with an ebullient, fun-loving personality.

A lot of us know the basics of the Khaman Maluach story, that he was a refugee, that basketball found him boy chance, but this video gets into some details that you might not know. One of our favorite things about his story is that he used to watch YouTube after midnight, when it was cheaper, so that he could study moves by guys like Joel Embeed and Giannis Antetokounmpo. That tells you a lot.

But there’s a lot more here that you may or may not know and and we’ll learn a lot more as time goes by too.

You can kind of see him adjusting to this level of basketball which is much higher than what he was getting in Africa, and it may have knocked him back a bit. But he’s still 7-2, he still gets up and down the court fast and he still is a force on defense. He has a lot to figure out offensively, but as that happens, he’ll improve rapidly.

It’s really great that we’re the fans who get to see it happen.