GEORGI '85 (Patreon)

Hi, it's Seth. This is a video I made with Ryan Simmons about the first time a basketball player ever got drafted and signed into the NBA directly from an overseas league. His name is Georgi Glouchkov, he's from Bulgaria, and while he wasn't a particularly important player on the court, he represents a critical juncture in NBA history.

As we attempted to explain recently, this video is part of something bigger. For Ryan and I, it's part of what I'm calling The Donnie Expedition, a multi-part history of foreign players entering the NBA draft told through the career of longtime coach/executive Donnie Nelson. For NBA stories in general, it was our first use case for what I'm calling The Draft Cavern, our big-ass graphic depicting every single NBA draft pick ever. For Secret Base as a whole, this is the maiden voyage of what we're calling Secret Base Presents, which is just us using Patreon as a place to publish one-off (but still premium-looking) video pieces outside our usual series.

So that's all the context, and all the things we've been calling things, but if you'd just like to watch a video about a fun basketball story, here's that. And there are more videos like that to come. Hope you enjoy! Our expedition's next stop, SARUNAS '87, publishes on Patreon April 13.

Extra shoutout, by the way, to the individual on Bluesky who connected me with their wife, who helped me translate Yambol's official biography page on Georgi Glouchkov from Bulgarian to English. They never got back to me about credit or payment but I thank them just the same!

<3