Road to Duke
Traralgon, Victoria, is a coal town in the Latrobe Valley about 100 miles east of Melbourne. Population: roughly 25,000. The kind of place where Australian basketball isn't supposed to start — most of the country's NBA pipeline runs through Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, or the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, not the Gippsland hill country. But Jackson Thomas White, born August 5, 1997 to Jeff and Rachel White, grew up in Traralgon playing for the Latrobe City Energy, and it was where his basketball career began.
He outgrew the local junior leagues fast. At the 2014 Australian U18 Junior Championships, playing for Vic Country, White averaged 22.5 points and 8.4 rebounds per game shooting 57% from the field, posted four double-doubles in a week, and on Day 1 of the tournament against New Zealand he went for 38 points and 13 rebounds. The Vic Country team won bronze. White won Player of the Day. And almost immediately after that performance, he was offered a scholarship to the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra — the federally funded high-performance program that has produced Andrew Bogut, Patty Mills, Joe Ingles, Dante Exum, Ben Simmons, and a generation of Australian NBA players.
White spent the next two years at AIS in Canberra, attending Lake Ginninderra College for his secondary schooling and playing for the Centre of Excellence in Australia's South East Australian Basketball League against grown men. In 2014 he won silver with Australia's U17 team at the FIBA U17 World Championship in Dubai. In 2015 he averaged 8.3 points and 3.9 rebounds at the U19 Worlds in Heraklion, Greece. In 2016 he was named Basketball Victoria's Male Junior Player of the Year. He had also signed up for a one-game stint with the Cairns Taipans in the NBL — Australia's top professional league — as a development player, becoming an NBL pro before he ever played a college game.
This was the point at which the recruiting battle started. Boise State came hard. So did Hawaii and Temple. Boise State, in particular, had built an Australian pipeline — Anthony Drmic, Nick Duncan, and Igor Hadziomerovic had all suited up for the Broncos — and on a basketball level it made sense for a long, lean Aussie wing to land there and play significant minutes from day one. White himself has said he was on the verge. "It was hard to say no to Boise [but] I knew that if I want to go to college [Duke] is the place to be," he later told ESPN. "While I was at Cairns, Duke came, a few other schools came — really good schools — and I was still considering staying home and playing pro in Australia. Once my time at Cairns ended, I was clueless. I was on the phone to my coach at the [AIS] every day just trying to work out what I wanted to do."
Duke wasn't recruiting him to be a one-and-done. Coach K was recruiting him to be a four-year role player, a glue guy, the kind of long, physical, smart wing who could check the best player on the other team and not need the ball on offense. White wanted exactly that. "I wanted to really challenge myself to get better, and playing against future NBA players every day [helps me do that]," he said. He committed to Duke. He left Australia at 18, flew across the Pacific to Durham, North Carolina, and walked into a locker room where the marquee freshman was Jayson Tatum.
At Duke
Jack White's Duke career was almost the inverse of the Brotherhood profiles people read for the highlight reels. He was never the headline. He was never the closer. In four years he started 50 games and came off the bench in 87 more, and his career averages — 4.4 points, 3.0 rebounds in 17 minutes per game — would put him in the bottom quartile of any 247Sports five-star recruit. By any measure of NBA pipeline production, his Duke years look like a disappointment. By any other measure, they were exactly what he and Coach K had agreed they would be when he committed.
His freshman year (2016-17) was a watch-and-learn season. He played in 33 games as a backup wing on a Duke team built around Grayson Allen, Luke Kennard, Jayson Tatum, Frank Jackson, and Harry Giles, and his minutes were limited — averaging 5.6 a game, scoring 1.7 points. The team won the 2017 ACC Tournament and lost in the second round of the NCAA Tournament to South Carolina. White was learning the system, learning Duke practices, learning what it meant to share a court with an entire freshman class that would be in the NBA inside two years.
His sophomore year (2017-18) gave him a slightly bigger role on a team that featured Marvin Bagley III, Wendell Carter Jr., Trevon Duval, and Gary Trent Jr. Duke went to the Elite Eight before losing to Kansas in overtime — and White's best moment came in late December 2017 in the Big Apple, against Texas Tech at Madison Square Garden. With the Blue Devils trailing in the closing minutes, White hit a tying three to knot the game at 45-45, then six minutes later hit the go-ahead three. He finished with eight points, five rebounds, two assists, two blocks, two steals, and a pair of free throws that helped ice the win — the kind of stat line that doesn't get its own ESPN segment but wins a basketball game on a Wednesday in Manhattan. "The intimate atmosphere [of Cameron Indoor] is the antithesis of most modern-day stadiums," he told ESPN that year, talking about what it meant to play home games at Duke. "It's an absolute honour [playing for Coach K], especially at this stage of his career when no one really knows how much time he has left coaching. For me, I'm just hoping he's around for my time here." He was. And White was hoping to make sure of it.
His junior year (2018-19) put him on a basketball team that exists in a different category from the rest of his Duke career. That was the Zion Williamson team. The R.J. Barrett team. The Cam Reddish team. The team that started 7-0, beat Kentucky by 34 in the season opener, climbed to #1 in the country, and built a 19-game home win streak before the Achilles-tearing Zion shoe explosion against North Carolina. Jack White started 16 of the 38 games on that team, averaged a career-high 4.5 points and 3.5 rebounds, and was the senior leadership voice on a roster that was almost entirely freshmen and sophomores. He set a then-career high with 12 rebounds against Yale. He blocked five shots in a single game against Wake Forest. The Zion team made it to the Elite Eight before losing to Michigan State on Kenny Goins's three-pointer. White, on the bench in the closing seconds, was one of the players holding his head in his hands.
Then came his senior year, and the seasons came full circle. With Zion, Barrett, and Reddish all gone to the NBA Draft, Coach K appointed Jack White and Javin DeLaurier as Duke's two senior captains for the 2019-20 season. White had been at Duke for three full years, and he had never been the leading scorer of any game, ever. Now he was being asked to lead a team that had Vernon Carey Jr. as its star freshman, Tre Jones as its returning point guard, Cassius Stanley as its athletic wing, and a roster that needed a tone-setter every day in practice. White was that. He averaged 6.7 points and 5.0 rebounds in 28 minutes a game — finally getting starter's run, finally seeing the ball as a primary option in some sets — and was named to the All-ACC Academic Team for the second year in a row. The team won 25 games and was ranked #11 in the country when the 2020 NCAA Tournament was canceled by the COVID-19 pandemic on March 12, 2020. White's college career ended without warning, without a tournament loss, without ceremony.
Through four years he had played in 137 games for Duke, won 100 of them, made an Elite Eight twice, played behind future All-Stars in Tatum and Bagley and Williamson, and earned the absolute respect of his teammates and coaches. He was undersized for the small forward position at the NBA level, didn't have a true point guard skill set, and shot just 39% from the field as a senior. When the 2020 NBA Draft was held that November in the strangest pandemic-disrupted environment in modern American sports history, every single one of the 60 draft picks was somebody else. Jack White went undrafted. He was 23 years old, sitting in his apartment in Australia, watching the names go by on television.
What he did next is the part that matters.
After Duke
The undrafted Australian wing went home. He signed with Melbourne United of the NBL — the same league he had briefly played in as a Cairns Taipans development player four years earlier, before he ever set foot in Durham. He was a role player on a stacked United team featuring Chris Goulding, Jock Landale, and Mitch McCarron, and almost immediately he was helping them win things. Melbourne United won the 2020-21 NBL Championship, beating the Perth Wildcats 3-0 in the Grand Final. White, however, missed the closing stretch of that championship run with a torn Achilles tendon — the kind of injury that ends careers, the kind that takes a year of rehab and a re-learning of how to move. He came back the following season at full speed, played 37 games for Melbourne over his two-year NBL run, and impressed enough scouts to earn an Exhibition 10 contract with the Denver Nuggets in the summer of 2022.
That changed everything. Denver, in 2022-23, was the year Nikola Jokić won his second straight MVP, the year the Nuggets finally got the entire roster healthy, the year they ran through the Western Conference and won the franchise's first NBA championship. Jack White was on the roster on a two-way contract, splitting time between the parent club and the G League. He played 17 games for the actual Denver Nuggets in the regular season, averaging 1.2 points and 1.0 rebounds. On February 25, 2023, against the Memphis Grizzlies, he hit for an NBA season-high 7 points. The Nuggets ran the table in the playoffs, beat the Heat 4-1 in the Finals, and Jack White stood on the championship podium with the trophy as a member of the world champion Denver Nuggets. His two-way contract status meant he was not active on the playoff roster — he scored zero points in the postseason, played zero minutes in the postseason, and yet he is, by every official NBA definition, a 2023 NBA champion. He has the ring. He has the parade footage. He has the photos. He is one of approximately 450 humans on the planet who can call themselves an NBA champion, and the only Duke player to have done it without scoring a single playoff point.
The next 12 months were the kind of journey that eats up the post-NBA careers of most undrafted second-year players. The Oklahoma City Thunder signed him in July 2023 to a non-guaranteed two-year, $4 million deal. He competed in OKC's training camp and preseason, looked like he had a real shot at sticking on the rotation given the Thunder's frontcourt injuries, and then was the very last cut on October 22, 2023, when OKC trimmed to the 15-man roster. He never played a regular-season game for Oklahoma City. Six days later, he was selected #1 overall in the 2023 NBA G League Draft by the Texas Legends — and within hours, the Legends traded his rights to the South Bay Lakers, the Lakers' G League affiliate. He spent the entire 2023-24 G League season in Los Angeles, averaging 9.0 points and 6.1 rebounds per game across 22 appearances, the kind of stat line that says "NBA-rotation-caliber player who has not been given a rotation" without saying it out loud.
Then, on April 9, 2024, the Memphis Grizzlies signed him to a 10-day contract. The Grizzlies were a hospital that year — they were down to single-digit available players from injuries — and they used hardship exceptions to bring in 33 different players in a single regular season, an NBA record for player turnover. White was one of them. He played four games for Memphis at the very end of the 2023-24 season, averaging 1.5 points, 3.0 rebounds, and a steal in 16 minutes a night. The contract expired with the season. Memphis didn't re-sign him. The 2024 NBA Summer League came and went without a guaranteed contract offer. He went home to Australia for what would turn out to be his final NBL stint.
The 2024-25 Melbourne United campaign was White's best NBL season as a featured player. He averaged 13.3 points and 8.9 rebounds per game, became the team's most reliable two-way wing, and helped Melbourne reach the NBL Grand Final series — where they lost in five games to the Illawarra Hawks. White himself caught some criticism in that series for shot selection and offensive aggression, but he had carried the team there. When the season ended, he declined his player option for 2025-26 with Melbourne and tested the European market.
Bayern Munich called. The German basketball giants — fresh off winning the previous BBL title under coach Gordon Herbert — needed frontcourt depth for their playoff push and were happy to bring in an NBA champion who could shoot, defend, and play hard for 20 minutes a game. On April 1, 2025, White signed with FC Bayern Munich Basketball, becoming the first Australian player ever to wear a Bayern jersey. "Bayern just seemed like a perfect situation for me to come in and have a great experience," he said. "From the coaching staff, talented roster, and incredible city, I believe this is the best situation for me to have a positive experience for my first professional stint in Europe. I just want to contribute to winning." He wore #4. He played 12 games down the stretch and through the playoffs. And on June 26, 2025, FC Bayern Munich beat Ratiopharm Ulm to win the 2024-25 German Basketball Bundesliga Championship — Bayern's second straight BBL title and the seventh in their history. Jack White, NBA champion, NBL champion, was now also a German Bundesliga champion. Three professional titles on three continents.
In July 2025 he played for the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, hoping for one more NBA shot. The shot didn't come. On August 7, 2025, he signed with Mersin MSK of the Turkish Basketbol Süper Ligi for the 2025-26 season — joining a club that had finished sixth in the BSL the previous year and that had been home to fellow Aussie Will Magnay. Magnay had moved on by then, but White's path was set: a season of Turkish league basketball, against EuroLeague-caliber clubs and competition.
Almost as soon as he landed in Mersin, he flew back to Saudi Arabia. The Australian Boomers had named him to their 12-man squad for the 2025 FIBA Asia Cup — White's first senior international tournament since the 2023 World Cup. Australia ran the table. They beat Korea, Lebanon, and Qatar in pool play (White averaged about 5 points and 9 rebounds in 18 minutes a game), then advanced through the knockout rounds, and on August 17, 2025 in Jeddah, they beat the host nation in the gold medal game to claim Australia's third straight FIBA Asia Cup title. It was Jack White's first senior gold medal for his country. He had been with the Boomers program for a decade by then. After the medal ceremony, he flew back to Mersin and started his Turkish league season.
Where Is He Now
Jack White is twenty-seven years old, plays small forward for Mersin MSK in the Turkish Basketbol Süper Ligi, and is the most-decorated Australian basketball player of his generation that the Brotherhood has produced. He signed in Mersin in August 2025 after one season with FC Bayern Munich in Germany's BBL and a Summer League stint with the Atlanta Hawks. He is the only player on the Duke 2016-20 four-year roster — the Cameron Reddish/Tre Jones/Wendell Moore/Vernon Carey roster, the one that did not produce a national title but did produce more NBA Draft picks than any era in college basketball history — to have built a successful overseas career on his own terms after the NBA path closed.
He represents Australia in international competition. In August 2025, with Australia's senior men's national team — the Boomers, as the Australian basketball brand is known across the world — Jack White won his first senior gold medal: the 2025 FIBA Asia Cup in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where Australia beat the host nation in the gold-medal game to claim their third straight Asia Cup title. He had been with the Boomers program for a decade by then. He had played at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 as the youngest player on Australia's bronze-medal team. He had been a fixture in qualifying tournaments, in pre-Olympic exhibitions, in everything between. The August 2025 gold medal was the one that made the decade-long investment in the national-team program pay off.
He lives in Mersin during the Turkish-league season, and in Traralgon, Victoria, Australia — his hometown, the small Latrobe Valley city east of Melbourne where his basketball life began — during the offseason. He has done what very few Duke players of any generation have done: he has made the international basketball professional career his actual career, not a stop on the way to the NBA. The Boomers have a player who knows Coach K's system. Mersin has a player who knows what a four-year ACC career taught him. And Australia has a Brotherhood representative who, with the August 2025 gold medal, has now contributed something to his country that not even the most-decorated Duke NBA players have contributed to theirs.