Nick Young doesn’t have a wife, not legally. But the woman who’s been by his side for more than two decades, Keonna Green, is Nick Young’s fiancée, the mother of his four children, and the person he’s built his life around since they were teenagers in Los Angeles. They got engaged on Christmas Day 2019, and as of 2025, no wedding date has been publicly announced.
What makes their story worth knowing isn’t the ring. It’s the fact that Keonna was there first, years before the Iggy Azalea engagement, before the D’Angelo Russell video, before any of the noise that made Nick Young tabloid material. She’s the constant. Everything else was the detour.
QUICK FACTS
- Full name: Keonna Necole Green
- Relationship to Nick Young: Fiancée (engaged Christmas 2019; not legally married)
- Together since: 2002 (high school sweethearts)
- Children together: Four — Nick Jr., Navi, Nyce Amaru, and Naji
- TV appearances: VH1’s Basketball Wives (2017), OWN’s Behind Every Man, VH1’s Couples Retreat (2022)
- Business: Founded TNK Hair Studios in Los Angeles
Who Is Keonna Green?
Keonna Green is a Los Angeles native, reality TV personality, and entrepreneur who’s been part of Nick Young’s life since before his NBA career started. She appeared on VH1’s Basketball Wives in 2017 and later on OWN’s Behind Every Man and VH1’s Couples Retreat alongside Young.
Outside of television, she runs TNK Hair Studios in LA and has operated a children’s clothing line. But if you know her name at all, it’s probably because of how the media introduced her to the world, as the “other woman” in Nick Young’s relationship with Iggy Azalea. That framing was always backwards. Keonna knew Nick for over a decade before Iggy was in the picture.
In an interview with Essence, she put it plainly: “Me and Nick have lots of history.” She described their bond as a friendship deeper than the public narrative ever captured. “We share each other’s deepest, darkest secrets. We talk a lot. We have that type of friendship.”
How Did Nick Young and Keonna Green Meet?
They met in high school in LA around 2002. Nick was the star basketball player; Keonna was captain of the cheerleading squad. An OWN documentary segment described it like “every 90s rom-com”—the transfer student athlete and the cheerleader who caught his eye.
Nick went on to play at USC, where he was a two-time All-Pac-10 first-team selection before being drafted 16th overall by the Washington Wizards in 2007. Through all of it, the college years, the draft, the bouncing between NBA teams, he and Keonna stayed connected, dating on and off for years.
That “on and off” part matters. Their relationship was never the neat, linear thing the public wants celebrity love stories to be. They separated, reconnected, had their first child, separated again, and kept finding their way back. By the time Iggy Azalea entered the picture in 2013, Nick and Keonna already had a son together and over a decade of history.
How Many Kids Do Nick Young and Keonna Green Have?
Nick and Keonna have four children together:
- Nick Young Jr.: Born in 2012
- Navi: Born October 2016
- Nyce Amaru: Born June 2019 (named after Tupac Amaru Shakur, whose birthday falls on the same date)
- Naji: Born July 2024
When Naji arrived, Nick joked on Instagram: “I’m cutting my [redacted] off … my name Nick but I’m not trying to be Nick Cannon.”
All four kids’ names start with N—a deliberate family tradition. Navi’s birth in particular carries weight in this story, because the timing of Keonna’s pregnancy with her is what ended Nick’s engagement to Iggy Azalea and dragged all three of them into the tabloids.
What Happened Between Nick Young and Iggy Azalea?
Nick Young and Iggy Azalea started dating in late 2013 and got engaged in June 2015. For about a year, they were one of the more visible celebrity couples, the NBA player and the Australian rapper, living together in Iggy’s Tarzana mansion.
Then came March 2016. Nick’s Lakers teammate D’Angelo Russell secretly recorded a conversation where Nick appeared to discuss being with other women. The video leaked, and Rolling Stone reported that the fallout inside the Lakers locker room was immediate—teammates froze Russell out. Iggy responded publicly: “I actually liked his film. Thanks bro.”
By June 2016, Iggy announced the breakup on Instagram, citing trust issues. Within weeks, it became public that Keonna Green was pregnant with Nick’s second child. Iggy tweeted that she’d never been told and called it “a second shot to the chest.”
Keonna addressed it head-on in a 2016 Us Weekly interview, confirming the pregnancy and saying she wasn’t going to apologize “for being in love with a man who I have a lot of history with.” She described being labeled a “mistress” in the tabloids as painful, given that she’d been in Nick’s life since they were teenagers.
The media at the time framed Keonna as the disruption. The fuller picture is that she predated Iggy’s relationship with Nick by more than a decade, and her connection to him never fully stopped, even during his engagement to someone else. That doesn’t erase the messiness. But it does reframe who was actually the constant.
Are Nick Young and Keonna Green Married?
No. Nick proposed to Keonna on Christmas Day 2019 in front of their three children (Naji hadn’t been born yet). He got on one knee in matching family pajamas and said, “I know it’s been way overdue, baby. I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
As of late 2025, they have not announced a wedding date. A September 2024 Sportskeeda profile noted the couple had yet to set one, and there’s no public record of a legal marriage. That hasn’t stopped plenty of sites from calling her his “wife.” She’s his fiancée and the mother of his four kids, but legally, they’re not married yet.
Where Are Nick Young and Keonna Green Now?
Nick’s NBA career ended after the 2018-19 season, his last stint with the Denver Nuggets. The highlight was winning an NBA championship with the Golden State Warriors in 2018, where he was teammates with his cousin Kevon Looney. Nick is also a cousin of Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem, a detail that surprises people every time it comes up.
Post-basketball, Nick has stayed visible. He’s a regular on Gilbert Arenas’ Gil’s Arena podcast and was cast on Fox’s Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test in October 2025, though he quit after the fifth episode. He and Keonna also appeared together on VH1’s Couples Retreat in 2022, where Nick acknowledged that the Iggy Azalea situation had caused deeper damage to his relationship with Keonna than he’d realized. “She hadn’t moved on from it,” he told Shadow and Act. “I felt like I’d swept it under the rug more than anything.”
Keonna continues to run her hair salon in LA and raise their four kids. She’s largely stepped back from reality TV, though her appearances on Basketball Wives and Behind Every Man gave her a platform to tell her own side of a story the tabloids had been telling for her.
Their relationship isn’t a fairytale. Twenty-plus years, four kids, a very public scandal, and they’re still engaged without a wedding date. But it’s real, it’s lasted, and the woman most of the internet keeps calling Nick Young’s wife has been the one person in his life who never left—even when she had every reason to.
