It takes about an hour and a half to drive from the Charlotte Hornets’ facilities up to Greensboro, NC, which is where the organization’s G League affiliate, the Swarm, plays its home games. It’s a trip Mangok Mathiang has made a couple times now, shuttling back and forth between the two teams in his first season of professional basketball. While a bit of a gap separates the NBA and G League, it’s nothing compared to the distance Mathiang has traveled to get here in the first place.
Mathiang was born on October 8, 1992 in the city of Juba, which is now the capital of the newly-formed South Sudan located in central Africa.