Jongkuch Mach turned 18 in October 2025. He’s already 229cm — 7’6″ — just shy of the tallest players in NBA history, and taller than Victor Wembanyama. Now Australian basketball has to decide, fast, whether it can keep him.
Who is he?
Mach is Australian, born and raised in Perth to South Sudanese parents — the same pipeline that’s already produced a run of NBA big men. He plays centre, wearing No. 18 for the Basketball Australia Centre of Excellence in Canberra, competing in the NBL1 East, the country’s second-tier senior league.
Why scouts are obsessed
It’s not the height alone — plenty of players are tall. It’s what Mach does with it. Reports consistently describe a player freakishly mobile for his size, capable of running the floor and finishing above the rim without needing much of a jump at all. In July 2025, NBA Draft analyst Nick Kalinowski called him the most intriguing prospect in the world at that moment.
The box score doesn’t back that up yet — and that’s the point. Across 11 games in 2025 he played barely 10 minutes a night, totaling just 120 minutes all year. His raw numbers were pedestrian: 2.7 points, 3.2 rebounds, 1 block, on 70% shooting. But stretch those to a per-36-minute basis and the picture flips — 14 points, 14 rebounds, 4.5 blocks, 2.4 steals. His best outing came June 21, 2025: 9 points on perfect 3-for-3 shooting, 7 boards and 2 blocks in under 20 minutes.
The breakout
At the 2026 Under-20 National Championships in Ballarat this February, Mach helped Western Australia reach the gold medal game against New South Wales, a game WA lost narrowly, 74-71. He blocked six shots in that final alone. Across the tournament he averaged 20.6 minutes, 7.2 points, 6.4 rebounds and shot 71.4%. Clips of him dunking in warm-ups went viral.
The making of a giant
The height didn’t come from nowhere. His father, Abraham, stands 6’8″, and Mach’s grandfather was reportedly 7 feet tall. The family moved from South Sudan to Kenya before settling in Perth when Mach was just 11 months old — putting him in the same South Sudanese-Australian basketball lineage that’s already sent players to the NBA.
Basketball wasn’t an obvious calling. Mach didn’t pick up the game seriously until around 14, and says he was “kind of pushed into it” by friends who clocked his size. It stuck. Before joining the Centre of Excellence, he was part of the inaugural intake at the Perth Wildcats Academy — a 29-player class built with a deliberate focus on pathways for Indigenous and African junior talent.
He may not even be done growing. Mach was listed at 7’4″ as recently as April 2024; by early 2026 he’d measured in at 7’6″. His agent, Solomon Dech, says he’s added 20 kilograms of mass in the past 12 months alone as his body tries to catch up to his frame. It hasn’t been painless — he’s dealt with knee issues and now plays in knee guards, and as a kid he was reportedly too tall to lie flat in bed, sleeping at an angle instead.
The $1 million decision
Mach is now staring down the choice facing every elite young Australian: chase US college basketball and NIL money, or stay home on the NBL’s Next Stars program — the pathway that built Josh Giddey, LaMelo Ball and Alex Sarr. Offers are reportedly on the table from LSU, Colorado and Santa Clara. The NBL, meanwhile, is fighting hard to keep him in Australia. Fox Sports has already dubbed it a “$1 million decision,” and Mach is expected to make the call within six to seven months.
Not finished yet
His development team is deliberately going slow. The Centre of Excellence says it has been “stripping him back and rebuilding him properly” to protect his durability long-term, noting that being 7’6″ at 18 is “both a blessing and a curse.” Mach still has no reliable jump shot, remains raw offensively, and racks up fouls in bigger minutes.
But the combination — his size, his mobility, and a family pipeline that keeps producing NBA-level talent — has scouts showing up to watch every game he plays.
