NBA Summer League wrapped up in Las Vegas this week, and the box scores from Thomas & Mack Center have already rippled back to Israeli basketball circles. Two Americans who spent last season on Israeli Premier League rosters — Darin Green Jr. and Nathan Mensah — are once again being talked about as candidates for a step up to Europe's top competitions, a pattern Sport5 flagged in its own reporting on the post-Summer League market.
Green Jr. is the more eye-catching case. The Florida State product played for Hapoel Holon in the Israeli Premier League in the 2024-25 season before moving on to Serbia's Radnički Kragujevac, where in December he set a career high of 52 points — going 13 of 23 from three-point range — in a 111-102 win over OKK Beograd.
That form carried into Las Vegas. Signed for Summer League by the Dallas Mavericks, Green Jr. scored 18 points off the bench, with five assists, three rebounds and two steals, in a 96-88 win over Memphis. Two days later he matched that with another 18 points and five rebounds as Dallas beat Oklahoma City 97-87, then closed his week with 21 points on 6-of-13 shooting, including 6 of 12 from deep, against the Knicks.
None of that guarantees Green Jr. an NBA training-camp invite, let alone a roster spot — Summer League deals rarely convert directly into regular-season contracts. But performances like his are exactly what gets circulated among European sporting directors once Vegas empties out, and Hapoel Holon's old guard will recognise the type: a scorer the Israeli league helped season before he found his shooting rhythm elsewhere.
Mensah's route has been more circuitous. The Ghanaian-born centre, a product of San Diego State's college program, signed with Olympiacos in December 2024 as the Greek club sought injury cover in the middle of a EuroLeague season. His time in Piraeus was brief and light on minutes — two EuroLeague appearances and six Greek League games, in which he averaged 5.2 points and 4.0 rebounds.
Olympiacos released him that April, and within weeks Maccabi Tel Aviv had signed him for the rest of the 2024-25 season, pairing him with a returning Alex Tyus in the frontcourt. It made him one of a handful of players to wear both an Olympiacos and a Maccabi jersey inside a single EuroLeague campaign.
Maccabi, too, parted ways with Mensah once the season ended, and he resurfaced more recently in Turkey with ONVO Büyükçekmece of the Basketbol Süper Ligi. That makes him, once again, a free agent heading into a European club season — precisely the profile agents are shopping around the EuroLeague and EuroCup markets this month.
The churn isn't unique to players with Israeli-league stints. Cam Reddish, the 10th overall pick in the 2019 NBA draft, spent this past season with Lithuania's BC Siauliai before the two sides parted ways; he then played Summer League with the Orlando Magic, another data point in the same NBA-fringe-to-Europe-and-back cycle Sport5's reporting described as a genuine wave this summer.
For Israeli clubs, the subplot is a familiar one. Hapoel Holon and Maccabi Tel Aviv have long functioned as a proving ground and occasional relaunch pad for American players moving between the NBA's margins and Europe's bigger leagues — and Green Jr.'s Vegas week, in particular, is the kind of tape that Israeli front offices, not just EuroLeague ones, will have pulled up as well.
Nothing here is a signed deal. Both players are, as of this week, without a club for the coming season, and any move to a EuroLeague or EuroCup roster will only become official once rosters are finalised over the coming weeks. What is clear is that the Summer League performances have reopened the conversation — and that Israeli basketball, once again, sits somewhere along the route these players are taking.
