The Internationalization of the NBA

The NBA Goes International

In a memorable scene from the first episode of the sports documentary The Last Dance, Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls travel to Paris to participate in a summer basketball tournament. Upon arrival, the team is met with such enthusiastic welcome by European supporters that even the players seem surprised. Fan reaction to the Bulls participation in the summer “McDonald’s Championship” heralded a new era in the National Basketball Association, the top league in the sport of men’s basketball. Michael Jordan became a global icon. The NBA realized its dreams of opening to a global audience. Basketball began a journey toward international diversification.

Over the past three decades, this internationalization has transformed NBA rosters. In 1993, a total of 26 international-born players from 20 countries logged minutes in a regular season NBA game.¹ By the end of the most recent completed season in 2024, those numbers grew to 128 players from 43 countries.²

Figure 1

Put differently, international participation is now five times what it was 31 years ago, while national representation has doubled. After the initial acceleration of international participation on NBA rosters in the first decade of this century, growth has remained steady. International-born players made up about 25% of all game appearances last year,

Continents, Countries, and Players

After the initial acceleration of international participation on NBA rosters in the first decade of this century, growth has remained steady. As seen in Figure 2, European players have consistently made up the highest subset of NBA players born outside the U.S., since players from the continent drove the initial internationalization of the NBA in the early 2000s. Increasing numbers of players from American and African countries joined the NBA starting in the 2010s.

Figure 2

Out of the 569 players with NBA regular season minutes in 2024, a total of 58 players (10%) in the NBA last season were born in European countries, 32 were born in other countries in the Americas (6%), 19 players (3%) were born in Africa, 10 players (2%) were born in Oceania, and 8 (1%) were born in Asia. Table 1 shows the number of international players by continent in the 2023-2024 season, excluding U.S.-born athletes. European-born players made up about half of all international players in the NBA as of last season.

Table 1

In 2024, no country was more represented than Canada, whose 24 players with NBA minutes include stars like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jamal Murray. Other countries with double-digit numbers of players in the NBA in 2024 include France (12) and Australia (10). Among African countries, Nigeria had the most participants in the NBA in 2024 with 5 while Türkiye led among all Asian countries with 4 players.

Table 2

At a player-to-player level, the internationalization of NBA participation is most apparent at the top end of league talent. Indeed, the NBA commentari discussing how 1) the MVP of the last six seasons was earned by a player born outside the United States, and 2) this looks unlikely to change at least this upcoming 2024-25 season. According to bookmakers, players including Luka Dončić (Slovenia), Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokić (Serbia), and Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece) all have more favorable odds to win MVP honors than the US-born player with the best chance, Anthony Edwards. Best-in-the-world candidates come from all over the world now.

Still, there is further capacity for international diversification in the NBA. Scouting and talent development in the Africa, Asia, and the Americas will eventually further result in more players from those regions participating in the league. If trends continue, NBA rosters collectively might reach something like 60% US-born compared to 40% International-born over the next ten years. The top end of US men’s basketball performance might start resembling US Summer Olympics performance in Gymnastics, Swimming, and Track & Field: always among the very elite, but only the very best when a generational talent comes along. As basketball internationalizes, this becomes a math problem. A global talent pool of 8 billion people will produce basketball athletes rivaling the high-end basketball talent from the 350 million people living in the US.

Table 3

Footnotes

1. All country of birth data Basketball-Reference.com. Annual communications from the NBAs discuss family “ties” that certain active NBA players have to other countries. This appears relatively recent, so in the interest of consistency, I only use Country of Birth.

2. An earlier post discusses why going with Country of Birth is the most straightforward way of measuring this, at least for the NBA. I will avoid words like nationality and citizenship here because those are squishy and are not really what I’m measuring.