The Ford Center in Oklahoma City was built for Thunder fans, not for history written in Hebrew, but on the night of 28 October 2009 both things happened at once. Midway through the first quarter of a forgettable early-season game between the Thunder and the Sacramento Kings, a 21-year-old rookie forward checked in off the visitors' bench. He hit his first jump shot, and with that one swish Omri Casspi became the first Israeli-born player ever to appear in an NBA game.
It had been four months in the making. On 25 June 2009, the Kings had used the 23rd overall pick in the NBA draft on Casspi, making him the first Israeli-born player selected in the first round of any draft. Sacramento signed him to a two-year contract worth a guaranteed $2.42 million, and the wait for his debut became a small national event back home.
Casspi's path to Oklahoma City had run through Holon, where he was born on 22 June 1988, and through the youth ranks of Maccabi Tel Aviv, whose academy he joined at 13. After a loan season with Hapoel Galil Elyon, he returned to Maccabi for the 2008–09 season, helped the club reclaim the Israeli championship, made the league's all-star team and started for the Israeli national side — the résumé that persuaded an NBA franchise to gamble a first-round pick on a player out of Israel for the first time.
The debut itself was modest by box-score standards: 15 points in 19 minutes off the bench, with three rebounds, in a game the Thunder won 102–89. But the scoreline was beside the point. For a country that had sent generations of talented players to Europe's leagues but never to the NBA, an Israeli in an NBA box score was itself the story.
Israel's Sport 5 network carried the game live and in Hebrew, which meant commentators and diehard fans alike were up at five in the morning local time to watch it. Newspapers ran daily recaps of Casspi's stat line for months afterward, and radio shows led their sports segments with his numbers before Kings games had even finished on the American clock. One Israeli website marked the debut with a line the Christian Science Monitor thought worth quoting back to American readers: "After 2000 years of exile and 63 years of the NBA, he did not disappoint the firm."
The moment carried a bittersweet edge at home. Casspi's rise coincided almost exactly with a financial scandal engulfing Maccabi Tel Aviv, the club that had raised him, after allegations of a Ponzi-like investment scheme connected to the suicide of one of its vice presidents. Commentator Amotz Asa-El used Casspi's debut to argue the two stories were not really in tension: "Omri Casspi is a product of a trend," he wrote. "He shows that fundamentally, what ails Israeli basketball is a curable illness, rather than a terminal disease."
Casspi kept adding to the milestone through his rookie year. On 16 December 2009, in his first NBA start, he scored 22 points — tying the record for the most points by any King in a first career start since the franchise had moved to Sacramento in 1985.
He went on to play a decade in the NBA, moving from Sacramento to Cleveland, Houston, New Orleans, Memphis and Minnesota before a stint with the Golden State Warriors — with whom he collected a championship ring in 2018 despite being waived that spring before the playoffs began. He finished his NBA career with averages of 7.9 points and 4.0 rebounds a game.
Casspi did not stay the only Israeli in the league for long, though he remained its trailblazer. Gal Mekel followed him to the NBA in 2013, signing with the Dallas Mavericks as the league's second Israeli-born player. Deni Avdija went further still in 2020, taken ninth overall by the Washington Wizards — the highest an Israeli has ever been drafted.
Casspi returned to Maccabi Tel Aviv in 2019 for a final domestic chapter and retired from professional basketball in July 2021. But it is the shot he hit in Oklahoma City, in front of bleary-eyed viewers seven time zones away, that opened the door. Every Israeli who has followed him into the NBA since has walked through it.
