Five years after being drafted by the Toronto Raptors, Malachi Flynn has left American shores altogether, and is playing the 2025-26 season over in Türkiye. But he is not doing so without controversy.
In a road game earlier this month for his new team, BahçeÅehir, Flynn hit a game-winning three-pointer off of an offensive rebound with just 7.2 seconds remaining to give his team a 77â75 lead over Bursaspor. When Bursaspor got the ball back after a timeout, their guard Malik Parsons tried to drive into the lane for one final shot attempt, but lost the ball after dribbling into traffic – including into Flynn.
With the ball in his hands as the game clock ticked over to zero, Flynn – for whatever reason – threw the ball into the front row of the crowd, seemingly at one person in particular. That person then took to the court to confront Flynn, leading to several dozen others doing the same. Staff from both teams, both benches, security personnel and a few other chancers all spilled onto the normally sacrosanct court, as Flynn was shepherded away.
Flynn’s NBA Career
The basket was Flynn’s seventh three-pointer of the game, and took his individual tally to 36 points. It was a phenomenal return, as he scored almost half his team’s points, and Flynn showed himself to be an NBA-caliber bucket-getter, even if regular work in the NBA evades him.
Flynn was selected 29th overall in the 2020 NBA Draft by the Raptors and played parts of the last five seasons in the NBA. But he never secured a place with the Raptors. Partway through his fourth season, he was traded to the New York Knicks as an ancillary part of the OG Anunoby trade, then was retraded to the Detroit Pistons within six weeks as a part of the Alec Burks/Bojan Bogdanovic deal.
After his contract expired in the summer of 2024, Flynn initially signed with the San Antonio Spurs on a non-guaranteed deal, but was cut before the season started. A season in the G League would follow – punctuated by a ten-day call-up with the Charlotte Hornets in March – but the NBA work had dried up. So off to Türkiye Flynn went. And there, he has quickly established himself as a needle-mover.
A Crowd-Pleaser, Normally
BahçeÅehir, a team only founded eight years ago, have spent big to try and upset the duopoly of Fenerbahce and Andaolu Efes that traditionally dominate Turkish domestic competition. They already have a FIBA Europe Cup title to their name, and are currently second in Türkiye’s domestic BCL with an 8-1 record. And Flynn is the main reason why.
Flynn is averaging 20.4 points per game on the season so far, good for second in the league, alongside 5.6 assists per game, enough for seventh. He has always been a high-level talent, and proved his ability to score in bursts at the NBA level, most memorably in a 50-point game off the bench for the Pistons in an April 2024 game against the Atlanta Hawks. He was however never able to firmly establish himself as a long-term rotation piece at the NBA level.
With BahçeÅehir, though, that does not matter. The defenders Flynn is going up against are generally not as big or athletic, and Flynn – undersized by NBA standards – is finding it slightly easier to create the slithers of space needed when hunting his own shot. His efficiency at all steps below the NBA is way up on the sub-par numbers he posted at the highest level, and with a bag of tools and 30 feet of range, Flynn seems to be finding scoring easier/
By contrast, though, he appears to be finding the Turkish fans more bellicose.
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