You don’t have to be a basketball fan to be obsessed with Deni Avdija.
The Israeli NBA All-Star has been making waves on the Portland Trail Blazers this playoff season. Until the latest NBA draft, he was the lone Israeli in the NBA; he was joined by the Brooklyn Nets’ Ben Saraf in 2025.
Avdija began his career in Maccabi Tel Aviv as the youngest player to ever join the team. He was drafted to the Washington Wizards in 2020 and traded to the Portland Trail Blazers in 2024. While he first struggled with the Wizards, he’s become one of the NBA’s standout players. A lot of basketball greats have sung his praises. “He’s a quality player, he’s a big time player,” LeBron James said of Avdijah in one interview. Many consider him to be the best basketball player to have ever come out of Israel.
Here are some things to know about Deni Avdija beyond his incredible basketball career.
His parents are both former basketball players
Deni’s father, Zufer “Zufi” Avdija, a Gorani Muslim from Serbia, formerly played basketball in Serbia and Yugoslavia before moving to play for Israeli teams in the 1990s. Zufer fell in love with Israel as a young player. He first came during the time of the Gulf War, and decided that he would stay through thick and thin. “I came 30 years ago, if I had to go back in time, I would come even earlier,” he shared in an interview.
It was in Israel that he met his wife, Sharon Artzi, from Kibbutz Beit Zera. Sharon was a basketball player and track and field star.
The two married and raised Deni in Kibbutz Beit Zera.
Deni is really close to his parents
They’re both his biggest fans and have a lot of faith in him. While his father, who worked as a coach while Deni was young, is known for giving him his drive and indispensable player tips, his high school coach shared in an interview that Deni’s mother, Sharon, is his anchor: “She’s with him at home, she helps him keep that [routine] at home, that NBA routine is very hard.”
Zufer, too, credits Sharon with how Deni turned out: “It’s his mom, Sharon, 80% her, 20% me, if it were my education, it would be a mess, but they didn’t let me get too involved, so it all came out great.”
“I feel like Zufi is a hard person to take seriously, because he’s colorful, he has that silly spirit, but he’s very clever,” Deni said of his father. “The problem is that he doesn’t always know how to express himself in Hebrew, but I feel like at the end of the day he says a lot of smart things.”
His mother, Sharon Artzi, gave him the name Deni — and some Israeli reporters still struggle with it
In an early TV appearance on Israel’s sports channel, Chanel 5, Zufer Avdija brought a printed sheet of paper to the studio from home. On it was his son’s name, with the Hebrew vowels on it. You see, Israeli reporters still mispronounce Deni’s name to this day as Dani Avadia, but the way it is meant to be pronounced is Deh-nee Av-dee-yah.
In an interview from the days when Deni played for Maccabi Tel Aviv, Sharon shared that she gave her son the name Deni because she envisioned him as an international star: “Deni is beacause I wanted him to have international luck so I gave him an international name.”
He’s a big fan of anything his grandmother cooks — especially kubbeh
In a 2020 interview, Deni’s grandfather Ze’ev shared that his grandson, like many an athlete, is a voracious eater, and is especially fond of his grandmother’s kubbeh.
“What will Deni do in the NBA without his grandmother’s kubbeh?” the interviewers then asked Ze’ev.
“No, no you’re wrong,” he replied. “His grandmother will come with him to the NBA to make him kubbeh.”
He believes in giving back to his country
Deni hasn’t just helped Team Israel achieve big sports feats, winning two gold medals at European championships — he’s also known for volunteering his time. For example in the summer of 2024, he met with kids in the South who were evacuated from their homes, even signing a shirt for a child whose father was killed on October 7.
His thoughts about what to do when other players speak against his home country? “I don’t think I should pay attention to every person who has something to say.”
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