Doug Gottlieb is nothing if not unique.
Yesterday, news broke that UW–Green Bay, the college basketball team Gottlieb is coaching this season while still hosting his radio show full-time, was adding Yonatan Levy, a 6-foot-9 forward who played professional basketball in Israel the last two years. Levy is 23 years old. He is a freshman for the remainder of this season.
I, of course, have questions, and all of you have questions too, and it seems like the answer to most of them is, “No, the NCAA does not have a rule against players having previously played professionally in Israel.”
Levy was brought in primarily for rebounding help, per Gottlieb via the Green Bay Press Gazette. We have no idea how good he is. He did play 22 minutes last night, and he did pull down six boards, but he also turned the ball over twice and shot 2-for-10 from the floor. Like all hyped but mysterious foreign imports (thinkin’ Zvonimir Ivišić here), our early read is that Levy is coming to Green Bay to be a chaotic force. I expect him to drop 30 and 15 one night. I expect more nights of 20% shooting. This guess comes entirely from one box score and vibes.
How did Gottlieb find this guy? Israel. I don’t know all the details on this case, but Gottlieb has worked in the Israeli basketball sphere before. In fact, his only coaching experience prior to taking the Green Bay job came in the Maccabiah Games in 2009 and 2017, a sporting event featuring Jewish and/or Israeli athletes from all over the world. In ’09, he helped Bruce Pearl coach Team USA in these Maccabiah Games. In ’17, he was the head coach. Won a gold medal, in fact. I have always taken this to mean that Doug Gottlieb is intricately involved in the Israeli basketball world, but as I re-read this paragraph, I realize I may have jumped to some conclusions.
Anyway, the funniest scenario is that there’s a big scandal in May and Levy’s outed as a Mossad agent. OR. That Gottlieb’s outed as a Mossad agent. Scrap the first one. The funniest scenario is that we find out Gottlieb’s actually got three jobs, not two, and that one of them is being a secret agent for the Israeli government.
