A first-round pick in the 1996 NBA Draft, a misleading basketball card, and the search for a career that stretched across 11 countries after the NBA
When I was a kid, Priest Lauderdale first existed to me as a basketball card:
More specifically, this NBA Hoops card from the 1997-98 set, with one of those names that seemed impossible to forget. Priest Lauderdale. Even before I understood who he was, the name had a strange pull. The name itself had a story. According to later accounts, his mother, Vickie, chose “Priest” after the main character in Super Fly, the 1972 blaxploitation film. It was not a religious name, even if that is where my French ear naturally went, while “Lauderdale” had something almost elegant and distant about it.
On the front, he looked exactly like the kind of player a young collector could turn into a minor obsession: a huge Atlanta Hawks center, ball in hand, the old flaming NBA Hoops design around him, his name printed in massive yellow letters.
Then came the back of the card.
Hoops had made a choice that fascinated me at the time: it listed his statistics projected over 48 minutes. I did not yet understand how misleading that could be. I did not fully grasp that per-48 numbers could turn end-of-the-bench players into small statistical mirages, especially those who came alive in garbage time, when games had already lost their shape.
So there he was: a 7-foot-3 center, a fascinating name, and numbers inflated by projection into something larger than reality.
In a way, that was the perfect introduction to Priest Lauderdale. A player who always seemed bigger as an idea than he ever became in the NBA.
As the years passed, though, I remember being surprised that my Lauderdale had vanished. He was no longer in the preseason guides I used to read. He was no longer showing up in new card sets. The player who had looked so large on that Hoops card, literally and statistically, had slipped out of the NBA picture almost as quickly as he had entered it.
For years, that was the whole mystery: a card, a name, a body that seemed too large to forget, and almost nothing else.
So I started looking.
What I found was not a failed NBA story, or at least not only that. It was the story of a player whose basketball life became much larger once he left the part of the game I knew how to see.
The old scouting books were less easily fooled.
I like to start there now, with the Complete Handbooks of Pro Basketball, those thick preseason guides I only discovered and bought many years later. They were not distributed in France in the 1990s, at least not in any way a kid like me could easily find. Back then, my NBA world came mostly through cards, magazines, VHS and whatever fragments crossed the Atlantic.
In one of them, Lauderdale’s entry reads almost like a correction to the fantasy printed on the back of the Hoops card. He is described as a “big, friendly kid” who was still learning how to play the game, a 7-foot-3, 330-pound project with huge arms, some offensive moves, and enough passing feel to intrigue people, but also flat feet, conditioning issues, and a long developmental road ahead.
The handbook, interestingly, listed him at 7-foot-3, not 7-foot-4. Most NBA documents, cards, databases, and reference sites would round Lauderdale up to 7-foot-4, but he himself has said he was “only” 7-foot-3, shorter than Rik Smits or Arvydas Sabonis, on the “Not my House” podcast.
A First-Round Project in a Star-Making Draft
Selected at the end of the first round of the legendary 1996 NBA Draft, with the 28th overall pick, Lauderdale was already an unusual prospect: a center who had played only 13 games at little-known Central State University in Ohio, a school that had not produced an NBA player since 1966 and would not produce another one after him.
Thirteen games was almost nothing, but the production was impossible to ignore: 20.1 points and 10.2 rebounds per game on 68.4 percent shooting. The warning sign was just as obvious: 19-for-47 from the free throw line, barely 40 percent.
His basketball education had never followed the usual path. Lauderdale grew up in Chicago, but he did not come through the clean machinery of high school stardom, AAU circuits, and elite college recruitment. He learned on blacktops and in street tournaments. One of the local figures around him was Rickey Green, the former Jazz point guard and Chicago basketball name was his godfather.
That is how he ended up at Central State, recruited by an assistant coach from a small program far away from the NBA’s usual pipeline. His college career lasted only a fragment of a season before academic eligibility ended it.
And before he was even drafted, Lauderdale had already started moving.
The Chicago native crossed the Atlantic to play in Greece for Peristeri B.C., an Athens-area club. That season mattered. In Greece, he showed he could produce against professionals, averaging roughly 16 points and 11 rebounds while shooting over 70 percent from the field.
That season was strong enough to put him in the Greek League’s version of an All-Star Game, a local-versus-American showcase built around the best Greek-based players. Team USA, featuring Dominique Wilkins, Xavier McDaniel, Buck Johnson, Mitchell Wiggins, Dean Garrett, and Lawrence Funderburke, won the exhibition 124-113.
By draft night in 1996, Lauderdale was not a polished prospect, but he had become a plausible gamble. Atlanta had the 28th pick. Chicago was sitting right behind at 29. Scouts had gone to Greece to see him.
He joined an excellent Hawks team, not a rebuilding one.
Atlanta won 56 games in 1996-97. Lenny Wilkens was the coach, Christian Laettner became an All-Star, Mookie Blaylock was an All-Defensive guard, Steve Smith was the leading scorer. Dikembe Mutombo was the Defensive Player of the Year and an All-Star, a towering presence in the middle of everything. Lauderdale, the only rookie on the roster, was technically the one true center behind Mutombo, but there was little room for experimentation.
He played 35 regular-season games and appeared briefly in three playoff games before Atlanta’s season ended against the Bulls in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
The following September, Lauderdale was sent to Denver. In a way, the trade made sense. Bill Hanzlik, an assistant in Atlanta during Lauderdale’s rookie year, had taken over as head coach of the Nuggets. Lauderdale wanted a better chance to play. Denver, unlike Atlanta, was not trying to win immediately.
The opportunity came inside one of the worst seasons in franchise history.
The 1997-98 Nuggets won 11 games, Lauderdale played 39 games, more than he had in Atlanta, and his minutes rose slightly. But he still did not break through. In a team that had little structure, little stability almost no winning context.
After Denver, there were attempts to stay close to the league. There were minor-league stops in Grand Rapids, Fort Wayne, and Connecticut.
But his NBA life effectively ended. And then, at least from the US, Priest Lauderdale seemed to disappear.
The World After the NBA
Lauderdale’s real career did not end with the NBA. In many ways, that was when the longer, stranger, more revealing story began.
His career moved first through the American margins, then back across the world: Venezuela, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, China, Iraq, Lebanon, England. The list can look almost absurd when written in one line, but that is the point. Lauderdale’s basketball life became less like a career path than a travel route, a long professional migration built around size, need, short contracts, and the strange economy of the global game.
Bulgaria became the closest thing to a second basketball home.
With Lukoil Academic Sofia, he was no longer just a former NBA first-round pick passing through. He became part of the dominant team in Bulgarian basketball, winning titles, playing in European competition, and producing like a real centerpiece. Local reports from that period described him as one of the most valuable players in the ULEB Cup, a player capable of giving Lukoil close to 20 points, double-digit rebounds, and rim protection on European nights.
Bulgaria became more than another stop on the map. In November 2004, after three seasons with Lukoil Academic, Lauderdale obtained a Bulgarian passport. The move had a practical purpose: he would no longer count as a foreign player in the Bulgarian league.
From there, the map kept expanding.
There were also the stops that seemed to exist somewhere between contract, rumor, and possibility. In June 2002, the Manila press announced Lauderdale as a major import for FedEx Express in the Philippine Basketball Association. The framing was familiar: a 7-foot-3 former NBA center, a first-round pick, a man whose size alone could change a team’s geometry. FedEx imagined him as the inside half of a new import pairing with Jermaine Walker, a way to force double teams, control the boards, and give the franchise a real presence in the paint.
For a few days, the story had the feel of a spectacle arriving in town. Lauderdale was described as the tallest player ever to set foot on a Philippine basketball court, a player who could nearly touch the net just by raising his hand. His coach talked about acclimating him to the country’s heat and humidity.
Then came the very kind of detail that makes the minor routes of a basketball career so difficult to trace. FedEx’s original plan collapsed because Lauderdale and Walker, taken together, exceeded the PBA’s combined height limit for imports. The idea of Lauderdale in Manila had been real enough to generate headlines, quotes, scouting reports, and expectations, but perhaps not real enough to leave much of a playing record.
Three years later, his name surfaced again in the Manila papers, this time as a proposed import for the Purefoods Tender Juicy Hotdogs (yes that’s the name). The article placed him between Bulgaria and whatever came next, noting his Bulgarian passport, his recent time with Lukoil Academic, and reports of salary issues that might keep him from returning there.
In Iran, he played for Saba Mehr and Mahram Tehran. In China, with the Shandong Lions, he was still capable of putting up heavy numbers, more than 20 points and nearly 13 rebounds per game. In Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and back again in Bulgaria, his name kept resurfacing, always attached to a new club, a new country, a new short-term need.
The late-career Bulgarian numbers are almost more fascinating than the NBA ones. By 2010-11, Lauderdale was 37 years old, long removed the 1996 draft, yet still capable of producing around 23 points and 13 rebounds for Chernomorets Burgas. Levski Sofia signed him soon after, with the usual condition attached to players of that size and age: if the body held up, he could still help.
That sentence could have followed Lauderdale for most of his career. If the body held up, if the conditioning was right, if the league needed a giant, Priest would go.
That is what makes his journey more interesting than a simple failed-prospect story. Lauderdale did not become a longtime NBA center, but he did become a working-class basketball player across continents. His size, once treated as a developmental gamble, became his passport in smaller leagues where players over 6-foot-10 were rare enough to change the geometry of a game.
By 2016, he was in England with Oxford City Hoops, helping at youth camps and serving as an ambassador for a growing basketball program. The image is a long way from the flaming NBA Hoops card: the giant no longer framed as a mystery, but as a teacher. A job he also did in Germany in 2017.
After basketball, even his size remained part of the story. Lauderdale later appeared through Tall Models, an agency built around people of exceptional height.
Priest Lauderdale did not become the hidden NBA star those per-48 numbers once suggested to a child reading the back of a card. He became something else: a reminder that basketball careers do not always end when American fans stop seeing them. Sometimes they just leave the frame.
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