He keeps a photo blog of his favorite Istanbul restaurants, at one point finding his way to Ciya Sofrasi, an acclaimed Anatolian kitchen once profiled in The New Yorker.

He has organized a cinema night for a group of fans and visited schools. He sent high school seniors a good-luck message ahead of their exams. “I never saw something like that in my entire life,” said one student who appreciated the gesture, 17-year-old Zehra Tanguzer. “He’s not just Ekpe Udoh the basketball player. He’s like a big brother.”

And Turkey’s basketball experts tend to agree.

“There have been many American basketball players in Turkey since the 1980s, and they were also talented, but Ekpe is different because of his relationship with the fans,” said Caner Eler, the editor of Socrates, Turkey’s leading sports magazine. “He has a beautiful awareness of the other sides of life, outside sports.”

By his own admission, Mr. Udoh was not always so enthusiastic about his move to Turkey. After he signed with Fenerbahce in mid-2015, it took him several months to admit that his N.B.A. dream was — for now — over. After four middling seasons with Golden State and Milwaukee, he had just spent a depressing year on the bench with the Los Angeles Clippers, averaging less than four minutes a game.

Arriving in Istanbul, Mr. Udoh felt depressed and lonely, thousands of miles from his family and friends. The son of Nigerian immigrants — his father a radiologist, his mother a nurse — he spent his childhood in Oklahoma and most of his college days at Baylor University in Texas. Little had prepared him for a life abroad.

“Hoo, that was brutal,” Mr. Udoh remembered during a recent courtside interview. “I probably didn’t accept it until January, February that I was overseas.” Finally, he thought: “Yeah, I’m here. Let’s make the most of it.”