As someone who's lived in Atlanta for the past six years, I distinctly remember the shocking announcement that Josh Childress had decided to leave the Hawks. He passed up on the team's $36 million offer, which would've paid him a respectable $5.6 million in his first year. Instead, the forward accepted a more lucrative three-year offer from Olympiacos, a Greek basketball team. At the time, it made him the "the highest-paid basketball player in the world outside of the N.B.A.," but he's since spoken out against his decision. If you read his interviews from before and after his stint in Greece, it seems as if he didn't quite consider all the tradeoffs of leaving the NBA before he crossed the Atlantic.

In recent years, a growing number of American players have decided to take their talents abroad and play outside of the United States. Veterans like Tracy McGrady, Stephon Marbury, and Jordan Farmar have headed overseas this year for a variety of reasons, whether it be money, searching for playing time they can't find in the NBA, or a longing for different cultural experiences.

Last night in Oakland, the Golden State Warriors played Maccabi Haifa of the Israeli League in a meaningless game between mediocre teams. Two thousand miles away, I sat in a hotel room and ignored other events of much larger importance, instead clicking refresh every 30 seconds to see the meaningless box score updated over and over again.

I’ll explain. My fascination with Jeremy Tyler, the current Warriors big man and former Haifa benchwarmer, began on August 15, 2009. Three days before, Tyler, then an 18-year-old rising high school senior and a major college basketball prospect, had signed for one year and $140,000 with Haifa. He would not finish high school, at least not yet. He would not attend college, at least not to play basketball. He would fly halfway across the world and make money to play a game, and he would stay overseas until the NBA deemed him old enough to make even more money playing that game, and along the way he would give people who are paid to shout about sports plenty of material to shout about.