The Israel Basketball Association has publicly pushed back on Hapoel Tel Aviv owner Ofer Yinai, rejecting as inaccurate his claim that the federation itself proposed naturalizing American center Dan Oturu before quietly dropping the idea under pressure from rival clubs.
Yinai laid out his version in a video posted this week, telling fans that association chairman Amos Frishman had approached Hapoel Tel Aviv months earlier about making Oturu the national team's next naturalized player.
According to Yinai, that request came with a price tag: he says he spent roughly $2 million reworking Oturu's contract to strip out a buyout clause, a change he claims the association needed in place before naturalization could proceed.
Yinai went further, alleging that once Maccabi Tel Aviv and Maccabi Herzliya got wind that Oturu was the chosen player, they objected — and the plan was shelved. His argument was blunt: if the association acted independently rather than deferring to the sport's biggest ownership groups, Oturu would already be starting at center for Israel.
The federation's response, carried by ONE, flatly contradicts that timeline. The association says its chairman never approached Yinai or his representatives about naturalizing Oturu or any other player — and that the opposite happened: it was Hapoel Tel Aviv that sought a meeting and raised Oturu's naturalization on its own initiative.
The association also disputes the substance of what the naturalization committee actually discussed, saying its mandate was to set general procedures for the process rather than to evaluate any specific player, and that no naturalization decision was ever finalized for Oturu or anyone else.
Oturu himself is very much a going concern for Hapoel regardless of the dispute. The American-Nigerian center arrived from Anadolu Efes and has since signed a contract extension through the 2028-29 season, having established himself as one of the EuroLeague's more productive big men.
The naturalization question matters because Israel's senior national team has long relied on adding eligible foreign-born players to bolster its frontcourt, a practice that inevitably draws scrutiny — and lobbying — from the league's ownership groups whenever a specific name is floated.
This is not the first time Yinai has clashed publicly with Israeli basketball's governing bodies. He has previously filed a defamation suit against referees' association officials over a dispute stemming from a state cup semifinal, seeking damages of more than a million shekels.
For now, Oturu remains outside Israel's national team picture, and the two sides have offered irreconcilable accounts of who asked whom first. Attention will likely turn to whether the association releases any further detail on the naturalization committee's actual deliberations to settle the dispute over the record.
