A world of talent around the NBA
There was a time — and it wasn’t all that long ago, really — when non-North American trained players in the NBA were very much the “other” guys on their teams.
Yes, there were lots of them spread around the league and they were celebrated as part of the globalization of the sport, but they were role players and backups and somewhat in the infancy of their rise to prominence.
Today, though, it’s different and it speaks to the late commissioner David Stern’s push to turn the NBA in a truly worldwide league and the development of players in countries outside of North America to the point where they are the stars of the game.
A quick list of best or vitally significant players on good teams who aren’t from North America yields this:
Giannis Antetokounmpo (Milwaukee) Greece
Luka Doncic (Dallas) Slovenia Nikola Jokic (Denver) Serbia Pascal Siakam (Toronto) Cameroon
Joel Embiid (Philadelphia) Cameroon Rudy Gobert (Utah) France Ben Simmons (Philadelphia) Australia
Kristaps Porzingis (Dallas) Latvia
Domantas Sabonis (Indiana) Lithuania
Nikola Vucevic (Orlando) Montenegro
There are others, of course, but that group of 10 is telling for where each fits in regarding any success their teams may have. They are stars — all are definitely all-stars or will most certainly be in the conversation when the teams are chosen next week — and they’ve taken an unprecedented role in the upper echelons of the game.
There are still so many from North America, mind you. LeBron James and James Harden will most assuredly be in the most valuable player conversation and Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant may be injured but cannot be forgotten. But this wave of international superstars is a manifestation of what Stern and others saw when they started taking the game global.
It was a slow process — for years the top international players were somewhat secondary in the rankings each season — but it’s been an inexorable march.
It is also conceivable that the roles will be reversed in the near future, with a vast majority of the top 10 or 20 players in any particular season being non-Americans, if not nonNorth Americans.
Teams are devoting more resources to scouting overseas, in Europe and Africa and Asia, and will continue to unearth talent in every point of the globe. Raptors president Masai Ujiri and general manager Bobby Webster were among a handful of NBA executives in Israel on a scouting mission this week and, as the league moves closer to the June draft, more attention will be paid to Europe and the Mediterranean, an area that was once a non-traditional proving ground for the game’s best players and a spot where teams would find late-first or secondround picks to fill out their rosters rather than all-stars.
Deni Avdjia, a guard from Maccabi Tel Aviv, and two stars in the top French league, ASVEL point guard Theo Maledon and Cholet guard Killian Hayes, are already being touted as lottery picks.
In keeping with the increased prominence of more international stars, Antetokounmpo leads the Eastern Conference and Doncic in second in the West after two returns of fan all-star balloting. That, however, is a bit of a red herring with the global nature of balloting a factor. There’s no doubt the fans in Greece are pumping up the Antetokounmpo totals and the Slovenian balloters are loading up on Doncic. And given that fans have someone determined that Kyle Lowry is No. 6 in the East and Kyrie Irving, who has missed more than 20 games already, should be a starter speaks to the accuracy of that process.
But it does not deny the fact that the leading international vote-getters are among the truly elite in the league and that’s something that’s going to continue unabated well into the future.