Aly Khalifa, the Charlotte 49ers’ 6-foot-11 conductor, is emerging at the right time

There was one possession in particular on Tuesday night, in a Charlotte-Davidson men’s basketball matchup replete with rivalry heroics, where the game seemed to belong to Aly Khalifa.

Here’s how that play went: Tied at 34 with just over 16 minutes left, Khalifa received a post entry pass on the right block. The redshirt sophomore forward then sized up his defender (Davidson standout forward Sam Mennenga), backed him down with four hard dribbles, spun left and then found himself alone under the basket for an uncontested layup.

He was so open, and got to the basket so easily, that Khalifa himself seemed surprised.

He might’ve been the only one who was.

Khalifa, the creative yet unflashy 6-foot-11 sophomore forward, is emerging right on time for the 49ers in the early-going of the 2022-23 college basketball season. In the 49ers’ 68-66 overtime win at Davidson, Khalifa poured in a team-high 19 points and 16 rebounds.

It was his second double-double in as many games and was essentially a showcase of all that makes him unique: Khalifa went 2-for-5 from 3, converted his only attempt at the free-throw line and played the role of seasoned conductor for the 49ers’ rendition of the Princeton offense — making sense of Charlotte’s constant cutting and turning it into gold.

“I think Aly is gonna be a guy, at some point, who’s going to get a triple-double,” Charlotte head coach Ron Sanchez said after the game.

Said an equally impressed if disappointed Matt McKillop, Davidson’s head coach: “Khalifa is just such a great passer.”

In the preseason, Sanchez called Khalifa “rare.” A big man who notched Conference USA Freshman of the Year honors, started 30 of 31 games, averaged 3.5 assists per game — all while accumulating an assist-to-turnover ratio that Steph Curry would gawk at (1.95) — deserves that moniker.

But early on in the 2022-23 season, Khalifa has noticed something that might trouble other Conference USA frontcourts: He’s better.

“I would say my game is way better than last year,” Khalifa said earlier this week. “I just got more mature, so I’m smarter now and know more of the game.”

Khalifa said he lost about 20 pounds over the summer, dropping from 250 to around 230, which has made him faster and more reliable on defense. He’s cut down on committing “silly” fouls that kept him on the sideline last year, he said, and has seen an uptick in minutes as a result. On Tuesday, specifically, the big man played 36 minutes — third only to guard Jackson Threadgill (42 minutes) and frontcourt mate Igor Milicic Jr. (41).

Khalifa has embraced what’s made him unique, he said.

“There aren’t a lot of 6-11 guys who just catch the ball at the elbows or the 3-point line and just direct traffic like another playmaker on the court,” Khalifa said. “Plus, with all the playmakers that we have, I feel like it is an advantage for me. And now I feel like I’m getting more in the post, getting my post work, and then whenever they trap me, I can pass the ball. It just comes out by itself.”

Khalifa isn’t a conventional big. His path to Charlotte wasn’t exactly conventional, either. Born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, Khalifa was a standout hooper at a young age. He played for the U17 Egyptian national team in the 2019 FIBA World Cup and went on to join the NBA Global Academy, an elite basketball training center in Australia, at the end of 2017.

In Khalifa’s first year, Charlotte associate head coach Aaron Fearne visited him and then basically never lost touch, Khalifa said. Khalifa then proceeded to win two back-to-back Academy Games titles in 2018 and 2019, and by 2020, he was a scholarship basketball player on Charlotte’s campus. (Khalifa redshirted the 2020-21 season. He still has a COVID year of eligibility if he wants to use it, too.)

Khalifa isn’t the only basketball player in his family. His parents didn’t play, he said, but his sister Nesma played at the University of Cincinnati and is now playing professional ball in Egypt. The two are quite close. They play one-on-one when they’re together — “I’m not allowed to block her in the paint,” Khalifa said — and Nesma watches most if not all of her younger brother’s games, he said.

“She always watches our games,” Khalifa said with a chuckle, “and she always texts me during games, whatever I’m doing. Like, against Presbyterian, I think I missed a layup or something, and I get a text like, ‘You missed a layup!’ or ‘Ah, you did this, but it’s OK!’ She’s just always texting me, even though she’s all the way back home.”

If Nesma was texting her younger brother on Tuesday night, there would’ve been plenty of exclamation points. Maybe a 3-finger emoji or two. She probably would’ve referenced that early second-half post-up, too — the one where he spun himself wide open for a layup, the one that marked an expected emergence, right on time.