Australians in the NBA: The Full Picture and the Numbers
Australians in the NBA explained. How many have played, every first-round draft pick, the eight who have won rings, and why Australia now ranks third.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Pathways19 min read
- Australians on 2025-26 opening-night rosters
- 13
- Australia's rank among countries
- Third, behind Canada and France
- Australians drafted since 1969
- 30 by the NBL's count
- Australian first-round picks
- Ten, or eleven counting Kyrie Irving
- Australians who have won a title
- 8
- Championship rings held by Australians
- 10
- First Australian to play
- Luc Longley, 1991-92
- First Australian taken first overall
- Andrew Bogut, 2005
Australians in the NBA are no longer a curiosity. Thirteen were on opening-night rosters for the 2025-26 season, a record-tying figure that put Australia third among all countries, behind only Canada with 23 and France with 19. That is a remarkable position for a nation of 27 million people whose winter sporting attention belongs to Australian rules football and rugby league.
The full picture, in one paragraph: just under forty Australians have appeared in an NBA game since Luc Longley debuted in 1991-92; the NBL counts thirty Australians drafted since 1969, ten of them in the first round; three have been taken first overall if you include Melbourne-born Kyrie Irving; and eight Australians have won a championship, holding ten rings between them. Ben Simmons is the only Australian-developed player to have been an NBA All-Star.
This page covers the whole record rather than a highlight reel: the draft history pick by pick, the championship list, the three routes Australians take to get there, what changed with the NBL Next Stars program, and why not a single Australian entered the 2026 draft. If you want the domestic league those players mostly come from, start with the NBL explained and the club-by-club guide.
How many Australians have played in the NBA
The honest answer is just under forty, and the reason it is not a precise number is that different bodies count differently. Wikipedia's list of Australian NBA players recorded 39 Australian-born players through the 2024-25 season. The 2025-26 season added debutants including Tyrese Proctor at Cleveland, Lachlan Olbrich at Chicago and Alex Toohey at Golden State, so the working total is now in the low forties.
Three questions decide any count. Does a player born in Australia but developed entirely in the United States belong on the list? Does a ten-day contract that produced four minutes count as having played? Does a two-way contract, where a player spends most of the season in the G League, make someone an NBA player?
Basketball Australia, the NBL and the NBA answer those questions differently, which is why you will see totals ranging from the mid-thirties to the mid-forties depending on where you look. What is not in dispute is the shape of the trend. Australia had one NBA player for most of the 1990s, a handful through the 2000s, and now has enough to fill a roster with players to spare.
- 13On 2025-26 opening-night rosters
- 2Countries with more players
- 30Drafted since 1969
- 10First-round picks
- 8Australians with a ring
Roster count is the NBA's own opening-night figure for the 2025-26 season and counts standard contracts only. Draft and championship counts are the NBL and Basketball Australia totals as published in 2025 and 2026.
Where Australia sits against the rest of the world
Australia's third place on the 2025-26 opening-night list is the most useful single fact on this page, because it puts the achievement in a frame that means something. The NBA that season carried a record 135 international players from a record-tying 43 countries.
Canada led with 23, which is unsurprising given the size of its junior system and the ease of moving into American college basketball across a land border. France was second with 19, on the back of a national development system that runs from INSEP through the professional Betclic Élite. Australia's 13 sat ahead of Germany's seven and Serbia's six.
The comparison worth making is not with Canada or France but with what Australia has to give up to produce those players. A tall, coordinated Australian teenager is a target for AFL recruiters as well as basketball coaches, and the AFL draft competes directly for the same athletes. That basketball wins as many of those contests as it does now, in a country where the football codes take the winter, is the underrated part of the story.
The draft record, pick by pick
The NBL's published list runs to thirty Australians drafted since 1969, when Carl Rodwell was taken by Atlanta with the 217th selection of a twenty-round draft that no longer resembles anything the modern league does. Eddie Palubinskas followed in 1974 at pick 61. Neither played an NBA game.
Nothing then happened for seventeen years. The drought broke in 1991 with Luc Longley at seven, and the pattern since has been lumpy rather than steady: nothing, then four Australians in 1997, then a long thin stretch, then a cluster in the 2010s, then four in a single draft in 2025.
Ten of the thirty were first-round selections by the NBL's count. Eleven if you count Kyrie Irving, born in Melbourne in 1992 while his father Drederick was playing in the NBL, which the NBL does and many Australian lists do not. The table below is the first round in full, with the Irving line marked.
| Year | Player | Pick | Drafted by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1991 | Luc Longley | 7 | Minnesota Timberwolves |
| 1997 | Chris Anstey | 18 | Portland Trail Blazers |
| 2005 | Andrew Bogut | 1 | Milwaukee Bucks |
| 2011 | Kyrie Irving, born in Melbourne | 1 | Cleveland Cavaliers |
| 2014 | Dante Exum | 5 | Utah Jazz |
| 2016 | Ben Simmons | 1 | Philadelphia 76ers |
| 2016 | Thon Maker | 10 | Milwaukee Bucks |
| 2019 | Matisse Thybulle | 20 | Boston Celtics |
| 2020 | Josh Green | 18 | Dallas Mavericks |
| 2021 | Josh Giddey | 6 | Oklahoma City Thunder |
| 2022 | Dyson Daniels | 8 | New Orleans Pelicans |
Two footnotes belong under that table. Chris Anstey was drafted by Portland and traded to Dallas on draft night, and Matisse Thybulle was taken by Boston and traded to Philadelphia, so the drafting team is not always the team a player first appeared for. And Thybulle, born in Arizona to an Australian father, chose Australia at international level, which is a reminder that national eligibility in basketball is a choice as often as an accident of birth.
Luc Longley and what a first actually costs
Longley matters more than his statistics suggest, and his statistics were respectable. He averaged 7.2 points and 4.9 rebounds across ten seasons, started at centre for three championship teams, and was the only Australian in the league for most of the decade.
The value was in proving the thing was possible. Before 1991 an Australian teenager who was good at basketball had no visible path. The NBL existed and was healthy, and beyond it was a wall. Longley went to the University of New Mexico, was taken seventh, and demonstrated that the wall had a door in it.
He was also, for years, the whole conversation. Australian television coverage of the NBA in the 1990s was in effect Longley coverage, and the Bulls' three-peat happened to coincide with the most watched period in the league's history. A generation of Australian children who later filled NBL and college rosters learned the game from broadcasts that existed because one Australian was on the floor.
Andrew Bogut and the first overall pick
In 2005 Milwaukee took Andrew Bogut, born in Melbourne to Croatian parents, with the first pick in the draft. No Australian had been selected first before. Bogut had just won the Naismith College Player of the Year award at Utah, and he arrived in the league as a genuine number one rather than a curiosity.
His career divided cleanly in two. The first half at Milwaukee ended with a horrific arm injury in 2010, the same season he was named to the All-NBA Third Team, still the only such selection by an Australian. The second half at Golden State reinvented him as a defensive anchor and passing hub on a team that won the 2015 championship and set a regular-season wins record the following year.
Bogut then came home. He signed with the Sydney Kings, won the NBL championship and the league Most Valuable Player award in 2019, and drew crowds that the competition had not seen in years. That return did as much for the NBL's credibility as anything in the Kestelman era, and it is part of why the league can now recruit the players it does.
The Australians who have won championships
Eight Australians have won an NBA title, holding ten rings between them. It is a short list and a strangely concentrated one, with two franchises accounting for six of the ten.
| Player | Year or years | Team |
|---|---|---|
| Luc Longley | 1996, 1997, 1998 | Chicago Bulls |
| Andrew Gaze | 1999 | San Antonio Spurs |
| Aron Baynes | 2014 | San Antonio Spurs |
| Patty Mills | 2014 | San Antonio Spurs |
| Andrew Bogut | 2015 | Golden State Warriors |
| Matthew Dellavedova | 2016 | Cleveland Cavaliers |
| Jack White | 2023 | Denver Nuggets |
| Alex Ducas | 2025 | Oklahoma City Thunder |
Andrew Gaze's ring is the odd one. Gaze is the greatest Australian basketball player of his generation and spent almost his entire career in the NBL with the Melbourne Tigers. He arrived in San Antonio in 1999 as a 33-year-old on a shortened lockout season, played sparingly, and finished with a championship that his NBL career alone would never have produced. It is the smallest NBA contribution on this list and probably the most satisfying.
The 2025 final produced an Australian on each side, with Alex Ducas at Oklahoma City beating Johnny Furphy's Indiana Pacers. That was only the second time two Australians had met for the title.
- Chicago Bulls33.3%
- San Antonio Spurs33.3%
- Golden State Warriors11.1%
- Cleveland Cavaliers11.1%
- Denver Nuggets11.1%
Ten rings held by eight players. Luc Longley accounts for the three Chicago titles. Counts players on the championship roster, regardless of minutes played.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Chicago Bulls | 3 |
| San Antonio Spurs | 3 |
| Golden State Warriors | 1 |
| Cleveland Cavaliers | 1 |
| Denver Nuggets | 1 |
| Oklahoma City Thunder | 1 |
Patty Mills and the sixteen-year career
Patty Mills was taken 55th in 2009, near the very end of the second round, and played sixteen NBA seasons. No Australian has lasted longer. He was a Spur for a decade, won the 2014 championship as the sixth man on a team that dismantled Miami in five games, and hit seven three-pointers in the closing game.
Mills is a Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal Australian, from the Kokatha and Naghiralgal peoples, and he used the platform deliberately rather than incidentally. He donated his entire 2020 Orlando bubble salary to Australian Indigenous causes and Black Lives Matter organisations, and he has been the most visible Indigenous athlete in a sport that Australia does not think of first when it thinks about Indigenous excellence.
He is also the through-line of the national team story, captaining the Boomers to the Tokyo bronze with 42 points in the medal game. That is covered on the Olympic basketball page, and it is the reason Mills means something in Australia that his NBA statistics alone would not explain.
Ben Simmons and the highest ceiling anyone reached
Ben Simmons was taken first overall by Philadelphia in 2016, missed his entire first year with a foot injury, then won Rookie of the Year in 2018 as the first Australian to do so. He was an All-Star in 2019, 2020 and 2021, made the All-Defensive First Team twice, and finished second in Defensive Player of the Year voting in 2021.
That is the highest any Australian-developed player has climbed. A 208-centimetre point guard who could guard all five positions was, for three seasons, one of the twenty best players in the world. The career then came apart in a way that had little to do with basketball ability, and by 2025 he was out of the league.
Simmons is worth understanding as a data point rather than a cautionary tale. He was produced by the Australian Institute of Sport pathway and Box Hill Senior Secondary College in Melbourne, went to Louisiana State University, and reached the top of the draft on the strength of that development. Whatever happened afterwards, the pathway worked.
Dyson Daniels and the defensive turn
The best individual season by an Australian in recent years belongs to Dyson Daniels, who won the 2025 Most Improved Player award in his first year at Atlanta after being traded from New Orleans. He led the NBA with 229 steals, finished runner-up for Defensive Player of the Year and made the All-Defensive First Team, the second Australian there after Simmons.
Daniels came from Bendigo in regional Victoria, went through the NBA Global Academy in Canberra, and was drafted eighth in 2022. He is the clearest evidence that Australia now develops NBA players rather than exporting raw ones, because the specific thing he does best, point-of-attack defence, is a coached skill rather than a physical accident.
His younger brother Dash Daniels signed with Melbourne United as an NBL Next Star at sixteen and stayed for the 2026-27 season rather than entering the draft. If he arrives as projected, the Daniels brothers will be the first Australian siblings to be genuine NBA rotation players.
Josh Giddey, Josh Green and the middle of the roster
Josh Giddey was the sixth pick in 2021 after a single NBL season with the Adelaide 36ers, the highest any Next Star has been taken. He became the youngest player in NBA history to record a triple-double in his rookie year, moved from Oklahoma City to Chicago in 2024, and has spent his career being asked to prove he can shoot.
Josh Green, taken 18th by Dallas in 2020, is the other kind of Australian NBA career: a wing who defends, moves the ball and shoots enough to stay on the floor. He won nothing spectacular and has been in the league six seasons, which is the more common outcome for a first-round pick and the more useful template for young Australians to study.
Matisse Thybulle sits in the same category, a specialist defender who has built a long career out of one elite skill. So does Jock Landale, a big man who has moved between Memphis, Utah and Atlanta. The interesting development is not that Australia produces stars. It is that Australia now produces enough competent professionals to fill the middle of NBA rosters.
Joe Ingles and the undrafted route
Joe Ingles was never drafted. He played in the NBL for the South Dragons, then in Israel and Spain, and was cut by the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014 preseason before Utah claimed him off waivers. He has since played twelve NBA seasons and become one of the best three-point shooters in Jazz history.
That route matters because it is the one most Australians actually take. Aron Baynes went undrafted, played in Lithuania, Slovenia and Germany, and arrived at San Antonio at 26 to win a championship two seasons later. Matthew Dellavedova went undrafted out of Saint Mary's College and won a ring with Cleveland in 2016.
Three Australians won championships without ever hearing their names called on draft night. Anyone advising an Australian teenager should say that plainly, because the draft is a single evening and a career is not.
- Junior club and stateA player comes through a local association and a state team, usually starting in a school or club competition run by a state basketball body.
- Centre of Excellence or NBL1The best are identified into the national program in Canberra or into NBL1, the semi-professional tier that runs through the Australian winter.
- The college routeMost Australians then take an American college scholarship, spend one to four years in NCAA basketball, and enter the draft from there.
- The Next Stars routeA smaller group signs an NBL contract as a Next Star, plays a professional Australian summer season, and is drafted the following June.
- The undrafted routeOthers go to Europe or the G League, build a professional record, and sign as free agents, which is how Joe Ingles and Aron Baynes arrived.
A structural description of the pathways in current use, not a ranking or a measurement. Most Australians in the league arrived by the college route.
What the Next Stars program changed
Before 2018 an elite Australian teenager had one realistic path to the draft, and it ran through an American university. The NBL's Next Stars program built a second one. The league pays the player's salary directly, so the contract does not consume a club's cap space or an import slot, and the player spends a season being coached professionally against grown men.
Eleven Next Stars were drafted into the NBA between 2020 and 2025. LaMelo Ball went third in 2020 and Josh Giddey sixth in 2021, and Karim López became the twelfth Next Star drafted when Memphis took him at 21 in 2026. Not all of them are Australian, which is part of the point: the program has made the NBL a destination for international prospects, and that lifts the standard Australians train against every day.
The full mechanics are on the NBL guide, including how the salary sits outside the cap. What matters here is the effect on the pathway. An Australian eighteen-year-old now has a genuine choice between a professional season at home and an unpaid or lightly paid year in American college basketball, and that choice did not exist a decade ago.
Why no Australian entered the 2026 draft
For the first time in years, not one Australian declared as an early entrant for the 2026 NBA draft. It was only the third time in a decade that had happened, and the reason was money rather than talent.
Name, image and likeness deals have pushed American college salaries into the hundreds of thousands of US dollars. A good college senior can now earn more than a second-round NBA rookie on a non-guaranteed contract, with less risk and a longer runway. Alex Condon, ranked around the top thirty of ESPN's board, returned to Florida for a senior year after winning the 2025 national championship. Dash Daniels stayed at Melbourne United despite late first-round projections.
The whole 2026 early-entry pool was 71 players, the smallest since 2003, for a draft of 60 selections. Meanwhile 65 Australians entered the NCAA transfer portal in 2026, 22 men and 43 women. The pathway has not narrowed. It has slowed down deliberately, which is a different thing, and probably a healthier one.
The 2025 class and the second round
Four Australians were drafted in 2025, all in the second round: Rocco Zikarsky at 45 to Minnesota, Tyrese Proctor at 49 to Cleveland, Alex Toohey at 52 to Golden State and Lachlan Olbrich at 55 to Chicago. It was the most Australians taken in a single draft.
Second-round selection is not the same as a career. Toohey and Luke Travers were both waived during the 2025-26 season, Zikarsky spent it with the Iowa Wolves in the G League, and Proctor and Olbrich held roster spots. That distribution is normal and worth understanding: a late second-round pick is an invitation to compete for a job, not a job.
The four-in-one-draft headline was reported in Australia as a breakthrough. The more accurate reading is that the NBA's draft has only 60 selections, that the second round is now largely non-guaranteed, and that the real measure will be how many of the four are still in the league in 2029.
Money, two-way contracts and what a roster spot means
An NBA roster carries fifteen standard contracts plus three two-way deals. A two-way player splits the season between the NBA club and its G League affiliate, earns a fraction of the minimum salary, and can be waived with little consequence. Several Australians have held two-way deals in recent seasons.
The distinction matters when reading roster counts. The NBA's official figure of 13 Australians on 2025-26 opening night counts standard contracts. Australian outlets reporting 15 are including two-way players and later signings. Neither is wrong; they are counting different things.
For an Australian family weighing the pathway, the practical figures are these: a first-round pick receives a guaranteed rookie-scale contract, a second-round pick usually does not, and a two-way contract is a trial. Compare that with the AFL's salary cap system, where every listed player is guaranteed, and the risk profile of chasing the NBA becomes clear.
The NBA in Melbourne, October 2025
In October 2025 the NBA played in Australia for the first time. The New Orleans Pelicans met Melbourne United on 3 October and South East Melbourne Phoenix on 5 October, both at Rod Laver Arena, with the NBL promoting the series.
The Pelicans won both, 107-97 in front of 14,880 and 127-92 in front of 15,164. The scores were less interesting than the fact of it: two full houses at Melbourne Park for preseason basketball, in a city that also hosts the Australian Open in the same precinct and stages NBL basketball at the John Cain Arena next door.
Melbourne became the only Australian city to have hosted NBA, NFL and NHL games. Whether that becomes an annual fixture or stays a one-off is unresolved, but it removed a long-standing argument that Australia was too far away and too small a market to be worth the trip.
Watching Australians in the NBA from Australia
The access is easy and the timing is brutal. ESPN's Australian feed carries games through Foxtel, Kayo Sports and Disney Plus, and NBA League Pass sells direct. What no subscription solves is the clock.
A 7.30pm tip-off on the American east coast lands at about 10.30am the next day in Sydney and Melbourne during the Australian summer, and roughly 11.30am in the winter, with daylight saving on both sides shifting the numbers around. West coast games land in the early afternoon. Perth viewers are two or three hours better off than the east.
The practical consequence is that Australian NBA fandom runs on replays, condensed games and highlights in a way that fandom of the NBL or the football codes does not. It also explains why a Christmas Day NBA game, which lands on Boxing Day morning in Australia, has become an unofficial fixture in a lot of households between the cricket and the tennis.
What Australians have still not done
For all the progress, some things remain undone. No Australian has been named Most Valuable Player, and none has come close. No Australian has been an All-Star since 2021. No Australian has led the league in scoring, and none has been the best player on a championship team.
The nearest anyone has come to a genuinely elite season is Simmons at his 2020 and 2021 peak and Daniels in 2025, and both were defensive cases rather than offensive ones. Australia produces guards who defend, big men who pass, and wings who shoot enough to survive. It has not yet produced a franchise player.
That is not a criticism so much as a description of where a developing basketball nation sits. France waited decades for Victor Wembanyama. Canada needed twenty years of steady output before Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Australia's pipeline is younger than either, and the fact that this paragraph can be written at all would have seemed absurd in 1990.
What to watch next
Three things will determine whether the current numbers hold. The first is Dash Daniels, who is expected in the 2027 draft and would be the highest-profile Next Star since Giddey. The second is whether college NIL money keeps Australians in American universities into their twenties, which delays draft entry and changes what a twenty-two-year-old Australian rookie looks like.
The third is the NBL itself. A league that can pay Next Stars, host NBA teams and bring Andrew Bogut home at his peak is a stronger development environment than the one Longley left in 1988. The finals system and the summer calendar both exist partly to make that environment viable.
For the wider Australian sporting context, the Australia hub collects the guides to every code, and the basketball section covers the game specifically. Basketball's position in that landscape is unusual: it competes with the football codes for athletes in the winter, then owns a share of the summer alongside cricket and tennis, and exports more professionals per capita than any Australian sport except swimming. The NBA numbers are the visible end of that.