Panthers’ Young now stars overseas
Last Thursday, Michael Young took the next step in his professional basketball career, signing a contract with Stal Ostrow Wielkopolski of the Polish Basketball League.
Later that day, he headed to a cozy gym in Pittsburgh’s Allentown neighborhood, a few blocks from a perch atop a hill from which the former Pitt star could see landmarks of a campus where he was one of its most prominent athletes just four years ago.
Basketball has taken him across the country and the wider world, from the ACC to the NBA’s G League and, now, to leagues throughout Europe. It’s a journey that continues.
Young, a Duquesne native, is back in Western Pennsylvania this summer while playing in the D.R.E.A.M. Pro-Am at A Giving Heart community center, a league in which he competes against former college players with ties to the area as well as other active professionals.
Only about a month from his 27th birthday, Young has turned the game he loves into a livelihood as he prepares to enter his fifth professional season. The most fruitful and rewarding days of his career, as he sees it, are yet to come.
“The phrase I like to use is, ‘My best day was yesterday,’ ” Young said. “I don’t like to think past tomorrow or think about yesterday. I think about the moment and be the best I could that day and move on to the next one. If you’re asking me when I’ve been my best, I’m going to say where I was last at. I’m always getting better.”
Young heads to Poland after playing last season with Ironi Nahariya of the Israeli Premier League, where the 6-foot-9 forward averaged 15.8 points and 6.1 rebounds per game for a team featuring, among others, former West Virginia star and NBA lottery pick Joe Alexander.
It was the latest stop in a basketball odyssey that has seen him play on three continents in a relatively brief period of time.
After spending a year in the G League, which began as part of a two-way contract he signed with the Washington Wizards in 2017, Young has suited up for teams in Puerto Rico, China, France, the United Arab Emirates and Israel, representing seven squads during that stretch. While playing for Hebei Xianglan in China’s National Basketball League in 2019, he averaged 27.9 points per game, which included a career-high 44 points on 19-of-28 shooting in one matchup. The following year, he played for JDA Dijon Basket in France’s top
professional basketball league, as well as Europe’s Basketball Champions League.
His years abroad have been eye-opening.
“You’ve got to be ready,” Young said. “You’ve got to be grown. What I mean by grown is you’ve got to be disciplined. You’ve got to be responsible. You’ve got to be accountable. You’ve got to be your own man in a world where you’re alone. You could be in another country where they speak another language by yourself. Yeah, you have your teammates and other people, but you go there by yourself. You don’t have your family. You don’t have your friends. You don’t have any of that.”
The experience can be a lonely one. Becoming conversationally fluent in a language is a challenge that mightnot ultimately be worthwhile, considering how short playing stints in a given country can be. Accustomed to it as Young is, being thousands of miles and an entire ocean away from family is difficult.
Young, however, felt like his life in the United States prepared him for what awaited him away from it. He spent his high school career away from home, in New Jersey at St. Benedict’s Prep. As he was there, he endured the emotional hardship of his father being killed in September 2010. As Young puts it, he has always been on his own.
“The things I would try to prep somebody about if they were going overseas, I’ve kind of been living that lifestyle for the majority of my life,” he said.
For everywhere he has been across the world, it’s still in his hometown where Young’s name resonates the most.
Young finished a decorated four-year run at Pitt as the program’s No. 7 career scoring leader, with 1,835 points, and No. 7 career rebounder, with 847. He appeared on two NCAA tournament teams, the Panthers’ last trips to the big dance. As a senior in 2017, he led the ACC in scoring at 19.6 points per game and diversified his offensive game, shooting 123 3-pointers after attempting just 57 in his first three years at Pitt.
He was a program centerpiece at a time of immense change, with longtime head coach Jamie Dixon leaving for TCU after Young’s junior season. For all of his individual success, something about Young’s final two college seasons was off, particularly his senior year when Young, who projected as a wing at the next level, played center and the 6-foot-7 Jamel Artis played point guard for a team without an obvious heir to four-year starter James Robinson. It ended with a disappointing 16-17 finish in 2016-17 under firstyear head coach Kevin Stallings, who oversaw a roster with two players who signed an NBA contract in some form and a third, Cameron Johnson, who just completed his second NBA season after being a lottery pick in 2019.
Young only dwells so much on those years.
“I had a great three years with Dixon and I also had a phenomenal year with Stallings, as a basketball player,” he said. “I can’t say this would have been this or that would have been that because I could make a case for Dixon staying my coach at the end of the year and maybe the team playing better. But I could also make a case for if Stallings was my coach from the beginning, I might have went pro after my sophomore year with the offense and the way he let me play.”
Admittedly, Young doesn’t make it back to Pittsburgh much. For 10 months out of the year, he’s playing abroad and even when he’s back stateside, he’s often training and working out in different places across the country.
It’s a lifestyle he wants to maintain as long as he can.
“Once I get to about 34, I’ll see where I’m at and see how I feel,” Young said. “I don’t want to play until I can’t play anymore. I’m not one of those players. Don’t get me wrong — I love the game and have passion for the game and everything, but I don’t want to play until the wheels fall off.”
For now, and with those wheels secured firmly in place, the dream lives on.