By admin 
DENVER – Motivation arrived in the mail for Alpha Diallo. He was home in New York City for the summer, trying to figure out his next move. Despite a successful first season of professional basketball, he was a man without a team.
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“I got a little check,” he told The Denver Post, “for a buyout from a team that I never played for. Never went to. So that was cool.”
It was from Panathinaikos, the Greek powerhouse that would boisterously try to poach Jonas Valanciunas and Nikola Jokic from the Nuggets a few years later. Diallo had landed a contract with them, only for it to fall apart before he could join the team. It was 2021, a year after he graduated from Providence College at the worst possible time – the COVID-19 pandemic. No March Madness to showcase himself to NBA teams. No draft in June. No pre-draft workouts. No timeline for him to cling to as his career began in immediate limbo.
Rather than wait, he had ventured into the unknown in Europe. He signed with Lavrio, a lower-class franchise in the top Greek league that was in danger of relegation. He helped lead them to the championship series for the first time in team history, where they stole a game from Panathinaikos in overtime and lost the other three games by an average of 24 points. A week later, Panathinaikos signed him. Not along after that, the team underwent a staff change.
“New coach came in and was like, ‘Maybe Alpha is a little too young,'” Diallo remembers. “‘Maybe he’s not EuroLeague-ready.'”
The new plan was to loan him to a different club for the first season of his contract. He wasn’t on board with that. So Panathinaikos decided it would rather pay him not to play at all.
Diallo is winning the breakup. His snub in Greece sent him down a different path, which has led him to an unlikely opportunity in the NBA. He was perhaps the Nuggets’ most fascinating offseason acquisition. Searching Europe for young talent is no longer a novelty in the NBA – it’s a mandate. But Diallo will be a 29-year-old rookie, signed to a one-year guaranteed contract and a roster spot in Denver. He’ll be teaming up with Jokic, one of the NBA’s biggest EuroLeague fans.
“Hopefully he can influence the guys,” Jokic said. “At least tell them the stories. Because he actually has a really good story. I followed him a little bit.”
The Nuggets noticed that Diallo has a tendency to help underdog teams overachieve. He did it with Lavrio and AS Monaco, his landing spot after the Panathinaikos contract fell through. Monaco had just won the EuroCup and been elevated to the EuroLeague when he signed a one-year deal. Getting into the second-best hoops league in the world is difficult enough; staying there is even more so. But Monaco reached the playoffs in Diallo’s first season there.
“We beat Panathinaikos twice that year,” he said, “so I was happy about that.”
He signed a three-year extension the next offseason. Monaco went to the Final Four in 2023 and 2025.
The Nuggets were watching, almost the entire time.
“He’s been on our radar for quite a bit. … This was a three-year process for us,” director of pro scouting Dethie Fall said. “He’s always come up in our conversations. We first liked him on a two-way contract, his first season in EuroLeague. … When I watched him in Monaco, I knew he had the makeup of a lockdown defender just because of his size, his frame, his instincts. He’s just got a knack for making plays on the defensive end.”
Fall and two of Denver’s international scouts, Rafael Juc and Marty Pocius (who now works for Real Madrid), consistently kept a close eye on Diallo, whose agents would gauge the market for any potential NBA interest after each EuroLeague season. The young wing was enjoying Monaco enough to feel picky. He envisioned himself on a competitive NBA team. And he didn’t want to play on a two-way contract, which offers zero job security.
“I wanted to be on a roster spot,” he told The Post. “… I wasn’t in a bad place in Europe. I was playing in the EuroLeague, which was the top league. Winning games. I’m living in Monaco, which is not the worst place to live. The weather is amazing. South of France. Right on the water. You’ve got the beaches.”
He became a fascination to the Nuggets across three continents in 2025. Fall was in Angola that year to scout the international tournament AfroBasket. Diallo has family roots in Guinea and was playing for the national team. Fall was startled by what he witnessed.
“Suddenly I saw this guy scoring, just getting to the rim and scoring, and I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know he had this in his game.’ He led the tournament in scoring, and it’s a very physical tournament,” Fall said.
Diallo averaged 23.8 points per game in a tournament with NBA players such as Josh Okogie and Yves Missi. Nobody else in the field averaged 20. The talent in a vacuum wasn’t what grabbed Fall’s attention. It was that he had watched Diallo for years in Monaco and not been aware of that talent.
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“He will go to whatever team and play whatever role you ask of him,” Fall said. “Over there, obviously, (Guinea) asked him to score, and he was able to score a lot more there than he did in Monaco. In Monaco, they have so many talented scorers on their roster, and he’s tasked to guard the opposing team’s best player. … The guy has adjusted everywhere he’s played. It’s a very special attribute for a player.”
Fall wasn’t the only Nuggets front office employee surprised by Diallo’s shape-shifting ability. Jon Wallace, who rejoined Denver as a co-general manager in 2025, had experienced it the other way around.
“I coached against him when he was at Providence, and he was always a scorer in college,” said Wallace, who previously worked at Georgetown. “He would have these crazy scoring games. So I never thought he was that level of defender until seeing him do it in Europe.”
The general manager of Guinea’s national team introduced Diallo to Fall, who is from neighboring Senegal and speaks French. Diallo grew up in New York, his wife was from Paris – they had met while Diallo was competing in the French league for AS Monaco. She was teaching him bits and pieces. “I can get by,” as he puts it. He and Fall started building a relationship. The Nuggets intensified their scouting work during his next EuroLeague season.
“The crazy thing is he never really had a lot of highlights,” Wallace said. “He’s always in a play. Or his team is always winning. Or he was always getting a stop. It was nothing exciting or sexy.”
“He keeps getting better every year,” Fall said. “When we go back and watch him, he keeps getting better. This year, the whole group started to get onboard. … He played himself out of a two-way, because he was making way more money than a two-way in Europe. For us, at this point, it was a standard contract or nothing. We had scouted him enough, we were comfortable enough to take a shot at him.”
Diallo was set to join Dubai Basketball on a more lucrative contract when the Nuggets swooped in this July, offering him the opportunity that most EuroLeaguers wait their entire careers for and never get. He’ll be paid $1.36 million this season, an extremely modest rookie salary by NBA standards.
He has a real chance to carve out playing time, by all accounts, at training camp this week.
“He doesn’t get screened,” coach David Adelman said, highlighting a defensive skill Denver hasn’t had since Kentavious Caldwell-Pope left in 2024.
“He’s a menace on defense,” Cam Johnson said. “An absolute menace on defense.”
Identifying his role on offense is more of a work in progress. And the question remains whether his ability to guard EuroLeague stars can actually translate to the NBA. It might be impossible to know until the Nuggets throw him into the fire against Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or Anthony Edwards.
“It’s incredibly difficult to make a rotation in the NBA, and Alpha gets that,” Fall said. “He’s got still a ton of work to do to get there.”
But their optimism stems from a belief articulated by their franchise player – that Diallo will play with a desperation native to European basketball and somewhat foreign to the NBA.
That he’ll play like someone who knows the feeling of getting cut by a team before even he even could show up for a practice.
“The thing in Europe and the thing for national team, the most important thing is to win the game,” said Jokic, who played for the development-based Serbian club Mega Basket before Denver. “I know it sounds stupid, but you know, in this league, you can see certain players, certain people that need to get their shots, need to get their points, whatever stats. But I think for national teams and in Europe, the most important thing is to win the game. I wish every player in NBA should go play, like, six months in Europe just to see how (much) pressure it is to play.”
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This story was originally published October 5, 2026 at 2:38 AM.