With increasing frequency, the NBA is helping U.S. sports fans learn world geography. And reminding us that a long-held provincial belief of American basketball exceptionalism is a bit outdated.
The latest examples are the league’s recent draft, in which a young lad from France was chosen No. 1, and the masterful work of the Denver Nuggets’ Serbian headliner in the championship finals.
On the elite level, the game—invented in Massachusetts, yes; but by a Canadian—still is overwhelmingly dominated by Yanks. But two of the first seven players drafted this spring are from Europe. And though it took 31 years of NBA drafts before a non-American was picked No. 1, there now have been 14 players from outside the United States so honored—10 in this century.
In recent years, NBA teams have thrived with a wave of international stars: Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, Cameroon’s Joel Embid, Slovenia’s Luka Doncic, Germany’s Dirk Nowitzki, Argentina’s Manu Ginobili, Latvia’s Kristaps Porzingis, France’s Rudy Gobert. Rosters have included top-notch Spaniards, Australians, Dominicans, Canadians, Chinese.
Really, anyone who has been paying attention to the sport could not have been shocked by Denver being led to its first title by the MVP performance of Serbian Nikola Jokic. In the peripatetic hoops cosmos, non-American efficiency began to become clear at least 30 years ago, back when former collegiate coach Fran Fraschilla, now a TV commentator, noticed that Europeans “took our game and made it more interesting. I fell in love with the way they played the game.”
Before Jokic was born—before, in fact, his native Serbia emerged as an independent nation during the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the ethnic wars of the early 1990s—those stomping grounds had become a pipeline of NBA talent.
Five members of the 1990 Yugoslavia team that won the world championship—most notably Vlade Divac, Drazen Petrovic and Tony Kukoc—excelled in the NBA. Four other Yugoslav stalwarts from that era—Dino Rada, Predrag Danilovic, Zarko Paspalj and Jure Zdovc—also were productive NBA regulars. That was about that time that basketball watchers quipped, “The Americans invented it; the Yugoslavs perfected it.”
Yugoslavia won an Olympic basketball gold in 1980 (when the U.S. boycotted Moscow) and silvers in 1968, ’76 and ’88, plus a bronze in ’84. Then, during the 1990 Seattle-based Goodwill Games, a now defunct Ted Turned event aimed at cutting through some of the Olympic politics of East-West boycotts, the U.S. team was humbled in back-to-back games by both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, mystifying the American players by eschewing a power, slam-dunk approach for passing, moving without the ball and deadeye shooting.
And though American basketball partisans, after the Yanks’ worst Olympic finish of third place at the 1988 Seoul Games, argued that they were being handicapped by international basketball federation rules banning NBA players, in fact U.S. hoops pooh-bahs had been blocking pros’ participation. Those Yankee officials figured our collegiate guys were good enough to win all the time and, more to the point, understood that the entrance of NBA talent also would bring NBA front-office types in to take their jobs.
So it was left to a Yugoslav from the Serbian region, international basketball federation secretary general and International Olympic Committee member Borislav Stankovic, to push for welcoming NBA players into the Games. That happened in 1992, just as the Balkans War was splintering Yugoslavia (and its national team) into what are now seven countries—Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro and North Macedonia.
In the confusion, Croatia competed as an independent nation in the ’92 Olympics, winning the basketball silver medal with former Yugo team members Petrovic and Kukoc. And Yugoslavia, allowed one more Olympic turn with athletes from Serbia and Montenegro, won the basketball silver in ’96. Divac and Paspalj were that team. In 2016, independent Serbia, with a 21-year-old Nikola Jokic aboard, took the Olympic silver—beating Croatia along the way before losing to the United States in the gold-medal final.
Before this month, the only time the Denver Nuggets played for a championship was in 1976, in their final season of the American Basketball Association before merging into the NBA, when their roster—like virtually all teams in the two rival leagues then—featured only fellows from American colleges: Kansas, North Carolina, UConn, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina State, Colorado, Stanford, Michigan State.
Not anymore. Now, along with the always improving, entertaining NBA show, our horizons and geographical knowledge are expanding.
There is traveling in basketball. (Swallow the whistle, ref.)