As the NBA playoffs approach the final round before the finals, Serbian Nikola Jokic has been voted the best player in the best basketball league in the world for the second consecutive season. Jokic is the third European player to win the MVP award in NBA history; the last, Giannis Antetokounmpo, a Greek of Nigerian origins, was one of the three finalists again this year, together with Joel Embiid, a Cameroonian from Philadelphia.
The MVP award given to Jokic – who with Denver ended the season in the first round of the playoffs – is the latest confirmation of how the impact of foreign players on a championship once dominated by US athletes is increasing.
In the eight teams that have reached the second round of the playoffs, European players do not limit themselves to replenishing the squads as starters or quality replacements, but are often among the leaders of their groups. Reigning champion Milwaukee has Antetokounmpo as its great strength. Dallas has Slovenian Luka Doncic, already nicknamed “Luka Magic”, who recently presented his first line of basketball shoes made with the Jordan brand. In Memphis one of the players with the most weight in the team is New Zealand center Steven Adams, while Miami had reached the finals two years ago with the Slovenian Goran Dragic, who moved to Brooklyn a few months ago, and would also have Bam Adebayo, born of Nigerian parents. but raised in New Jersey.
Ukrainian Svi Mykhailiuk during the United States-Rest of the World match at the 2020 All-Star Game (Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images)
Even outside the teams in the running for the title there are foreign players of some importance, such as Danilo Gallinari for the Atlanta Hawks, the Bosnian Jusuf Nurkic of the Portland Trail Blazers, the Croatian Ivica Zubac and the Serbian Bojan Bogdanovic, the Czech Tomas Satoransky in New Orleans, Lauri Markkanen, the Finnish of the Cavaliers, the French Evan Fournier and Rudy Gobert – one of the best defenders in the league for a few seasons now – and the German Daniel Theis, from this year to the Boston Celtics.
The current season had started with 109 foreign players from 39 different nations, and with the Toronto Raptors, always one of the most international teams in the league, with the highest number of registered foreigners, ten. It is the eighth consecutive season in which at least one hundred foreign players were present at the opening of the championship: in 1947 there were just five – including Canada – while the record was set in 2016, with 113 registered.
Canada remains the most represented country after the United States, followed by Australia, France and Germany, with seven players each at the start of the season, and then Nigeria, Serbia, Spain and Turkey, who have five.
Joel Embiid e Kyle Kuzma all’All-Star Game del 2019 (Getty Images)
With overseas expansion that began on a large scale in the 1990s, coinciding with Michael Jordan’s stint at the Chicago Bulls, the NBA has by far become the most watched North American league in the rest of the world. Abroad it continues to grow and that is why the league has intensified its presence in the other continents in recent years, in search of audiences and new revenues, also considering the decline in television viewers recorded in recent years in the United States.
The league has long had offices in London, and annually organizes league matches in Europe, between London and Paris. Last September, the leaders of the federations that govern European basketball also met to evaluate the possibility of reuniting continental basketball under a single organization, in collaboration with the NBA.
On the relevance of foreigners in the NBA, the magazine The Atlantic wrote an article lately, “Because it is good that Americans no longer dominate basketball,” in which he argues that basketball, the United States’ most successful sports export, has thus reached its zenith. Among national competitions – he writes The Atlantic – football will also be the most popular sport and baseball a “legendary” pastime, but basketball is somehow the most American sport, because the only one to have convinced even abroad, and this has helped it to attract and develop new athletes, always better.
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