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The NBA is starting to reflect basketball’s global footprint
Welcome to the 20th edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.
If you missed the previous edition, you can read it here:
While one World Cup ends this weekend, another one starts shortly after. Unlike in women’s football, the FIBA World Cup is far from men’s basketball’s flagship event — but the 2023 edition provides an opportunity to look at how the make-up of the sport’s top tier of athletes has changed.
I’ll be taking part in a virtual event with The Data Lab Community on Friday 31st August, talking about the work I do in this newsletter. It’s free to attend, and you can sign up here.
The NBA is starting to reflect basketball’s global footprint
As the top pick in this year’s NBA Draft, it’s not unusual that Victor Wembanyama — whose combination of skill and size we looked at back in June — is planning “to dedicate this summer to preparing [his] body” for a long career in the toughest men’s basketball league on the planet.
It’s just unfortunate that — as a consequence of this decision — we won’t get to see one of the most fêted prospects in recent history take part in top-level international competition with France over the next few weeks.
And this year may have been the best chance we will ever have of watching him in a FIBA World Cup.
If he does come close to reaching his ceiling in the NBA, it’s unlikely that he’ll make himself available for future tournaments — if the decisions of the sport’s current elite are anything to go by.
Of the 15 players selected in the league’s three ‘All-NBA’ teams last season, only two will take part in this World Cup1.
It’s a fact of life that top nations aren’t always able to send their best players to men’s international competitions — and it’s a particularly obvious one when you look at the star power left off the USA’s rosters in recent World Cup years.
But this does leave the door slightly ajar for other countries. Each World Cup serves as a reminder that, for all that North America dominates the basketball consciousness, the sport is a truly global one.
Team USA has only won five of the 18 gold medals contested since the first edition of the tournament in 1950 — a much poorer return than its 16 golds in 19 attempts at the Summer Olympics, where they tend to select stronger squads.
And, slowly but surely, the NBA is starting to reflect the worldwide reach of the sport.
Looking at the groups of players deemed to be the elite of the elite — the ones selected in those All-NBA teams at the end of each season — we can see a clear shift in the make-up of the sport’s top tier of athletes over time.
In the five NBA seasons from 1988-892 onwards, only five of the 75 available All-NBA selections were allocated to players from outside North America and the Caribbean3.
Over the last five seasons to 2022-23, however, 25 of the 75 available selections went to players from the rest of the world — by far the most of any five-year span since the league expanded the All-NBA tier over 30 years ago.
In 2023, men’s basketball players from all over the globe have been in the spotlight: Wembanyama was taken first overall in the draft, Serbia’s Nikola Jokić led the Denver Nuggets to their first NBA championship and Cameroon’s Joel Embiid won the league’s regular-season MVP award4.
For straightforward economic and demographic reasons, the USA will likely always be the centre of the sport’s focus — but it’s worth remembering that there’s a whole world of basketball talent out there.
You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here
Luka Dončić, for Slovenia, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, for Canada, are the two. Cameroon — who are not competing in the tournament — have called up Joel Embiid in the past, but reports suggest he is considering switching his eligibility to France.
The data is analysed from this season onwards as it’s the first year in which three All-NBA teams were selected.
Over this period, only four players in this broad geographic category — North America and the Caribbean — who gained All-NBA selections were from outside the USA: Canadians Steve Nash (seven selections) and Gilgeous-Alexander (one), Tim Duncan (15) of the US Virgin Islands and Al Horford (one) from the Dominican Republic.
An American player last won the MVP in the 2017-18 season. Prior to Embiid, Jokić won two consecutive awards; before Jokić, Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo won two in a row.