From the outside, the life of a professional basketballer can appear quite glamourous.
You travel the world while getting paid for doing what you love. It is a great gig when things are going to plan.
But it can also be a tenuous and fraught with risk, especially when you have a young family to support.
His professional stints overseas have not always been all they promised to be. Bulgaria was a hoot if you do not mind putting you body through the ringer and waiting up to three weeks for your "weekly" pay cheque. And, in general, the business can be pretty cut-throat, with imports often considered expendable.
But the O'Gallaghers hope a shift to Dunedin will provide them the best of both worlds. If the next three months go as planned, the 26-year-old point guard and his family - wife Kristen (24), daughter Brooklyn (2) and son Scott jun (7 weeks) - are keen to put down permanent roots.
Kristen's initial impressions have been very positive.
"It is beautiful here," she said.
"I miss family, of course, but everybody has been very kind and very welcoming.""I like it here, I really do," Scott chipped in.
"Everyone within the organisation has been great and if this goes how we want ... then we will be talking to Markham [Brown, Basketball Otago general manager]."
Both sets of grandparents are back home in Portland, Oregon. So making the decision to shift halfway across the world was a difficult one.
But Kristen, a former professional football player, is very supportive of Scott's basketball career and felt New Zealand was a better option than another trip to Europe.
"It can be life or death over there," Scott said.
"I had a stint in Bulgaria and I think I started one game off with about six from six. I came down, shot a pull-up three and missed it and my coach fell on the ground. [My wife] looked at me like 'What is this?'. It was a circus over there."
"[Bulgaria] was a bit of a culture shock," Kristen said. A wife of one of players spoke a little bit of English and acted as a translator. But otherwise Kristen and Brooklyn, who was just 3-months-old at the time, had precious little support and Kristen found the experience isolating.
To make matters worse Scott had to keep hounding his agent.
"If you won you got paid early. If you lost it could be three weeks late. You'd be on your agent constantly going on about not getting paid."
"It is scary when you have a family over there with you," Kristen said.
"You can't just not have money in another country."
While everything off the court is working out well for the O'Gallaghers, on the court the 1.88m guard is still adjusting to his role in the side.
"I'm still trying to find my niche right now," he said.
"Sometimes I want to be a facilitator and we'll have stretches where we aren't scoring and the coach tells me I need to attack, attack, attack.""But it is all just timing and once that clicks I think we'll be OK."
The Otago Nuggets are still desperately searching for their first win in the league in three years. They have shown promise but it is the little things which have gone wrong. A missed free throw or two, some poor boxing out or a loose pass here and there has been the difference in their opening two games this season.
The loss to the Southland Sharks in Dunedin was particularly frustrating. The Nuggets controlled the tempo for the majority of the match but let the win slip in the final two or three minutes.
O'Gallagher got thumped, bruised and battered cutting to the hoop. It was a gutsy effort and he posted a game high 22-points. But he felt he eased up during the third quarter and needed to maintain his aggression.
He will get another opportunity this Friday when the Nuggets host the unbeaten Hawkes Bay Hawks.
Tip-off is scheduled for 7pm but the Nuggets would like to shift the game to an earlier time to avoid a clash with the Highlanders-Blues match at Carisbrook, the ANBL decider between the New Zealand Breakers and the Cairns Taipans and the royal wedding.
