The fans who’d gathered at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, to watch the 2015 NBA draft were beside themselves. With the fourth pick in the draft’s first round, the New York Knicks—fresh off a season in which they netted only 17 wins out of 82 games—had used the draft capital stacked up from all those losses to select a gangly Latvian center. The 7-foot-2-inch Kristaps Porzingis was a basketball unicorn: He didn’t play near the basket, he could get beaten up defensively, and he had a name that most American fans couldn’t pronounce. But unlike most big men, he could shoot.
Controversial ESPN talking head Stephen A. Smith pulled no punches in describing the pick on SportsCenter. With the team passing on more seemingly NBA-ready players, Knicks fans had been “hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok, and flat-out deceived,” by management, Smith claimed.
Some took it further: “Who the fuck is Tingus Pingus?” one fan shouted at his TV screen, mocking Porzingis’s name in a clip that went viral on social media. “I never heard of fucking Lativia,” he said, adding an extra vowel to the country’s name.
He would soon find out. Porzingis averaged more than 14 points a game in his first season and more than 18 in his second. (Centers across NBA history average about 9 points a game.) By the time the Knicks offloaded him to the Dallas Mavericks in January 2019, Porzingis was up to an average of 22 points a game. He also made nearly 40 percent of his three-point shots. The Mavericks promptly signed him to a five-year maximum contract. And this June, Porzingis raised the Larry O’Brien Trophy over his head as a member of the NBA champion Boston Celtics, a team he joined in 2023.
Porzingis’s journey from anonymity to basketball’s limelight is just one example of how American players’ dominance of the sport has receded over the past three decades, making room for stars and squads from other countries to shine.
When the Michael Jordan-led U.S. Olympic squad known as the “Dream Team” cruised through the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona—beating their rivals by an average of more than 43 points a game—the United States was the undisputed global basketball powerhouse. David Stern, the NBA commissioner from 1984—the year that the Chicago Bulls drafted Jordan—to 2014, later said the team had been “feted like a combination of the Bolshoi, the Philharmonic and the Beatles” put together.
But basketball analyst Kirk Goldsberry argues in his new book Hoop Atlas: Mapping the Remarkable Transformation of the Modern NBA that that Dream Team was also the beginning of the end: when basketball’s balance of power began to move away from the United States. While both the men’s and women’s U.S. basketball teams remain the gold-medal favorites at the Olympics, that medal is no longer a given. The United States is also no longer the only national side featuring major NBA and WNBA superstars.
Starting in 1992, “[t]he American stranglehold on the NBA was fading,” Goldsberry writes, as international players and coaches who hadn’t been brought up in the U.S. development programs but instead had “honed the craft in their homeland” began to join the NBA’s ranks.
“It was bad news for jingoistic American supporters who wanted to live in a world where Team USA always won everything,” he adds, “but it was fantastic news for the sport. American basketball players’ decline on the world stage said a lot more about the rising tide of global talent than it did about the quality of hoops inside the United States.”
The Dream Team’s star run occurred three years before Porzingis was born. By the time he was in grade school, the tectonic shift had begun. Jordan’s second retirement in 1999 left a gaping hole in American men’s basketball: Team USA finished sixth in the 2002 FIBA World Championships. They were bronze medalists at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, where a squad led by Tim Duncan and LeBron James lost to Argentina in the semifinals, knocking the United States out of championship contention and snapping a streak of three straight Olympic golds. (The U.S. women’s team, on the other hand, won its third consecutive gold medal in those Games—continuing a streak that carries on to this day.)
The men’s loss shocked Americans: A defeat by a South American country was supposed to happen in soccer, not basketball. Stern knew that globalization would someday hit the sport, Goldsberry writes. But the speed at which the change happened made even the NBA commissioner’s head spin.
An inflection point for the NBA’s global reach would come in 2002, when the Houston Rockets selected Yao Ming—a 7-foot-6-inch center from China—with their first-round No. 1 draft pick. Ming would go on to be an eight-time NBA All-Star and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016. But his biggest impact was likely off the court: China went basketball crazy. The NBA cashed in, setting up sometimes-controversial academies in the country, scheduling preseason games there, and sending players on tour to crowds of adoring Chinese fans.
It was during one of those preseason tours that the relationship between China and the NBA fell apart. In 2019, Daryl Morey, then the general manager of the Rockets, tweeted a message of support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. The backlash was swift and fierce, with Chinese companies cutting sponsorship ties with the NBA and Beijing stopping state television broadcasts of games to the hundreds of millions of Chinese fans—a suspension that only ended two years ago.
Amid a broader deterioration in U.S.-China relations, there does not appear to be a single Chinese-born player playing in the NBA today. The handful who joined the league after Ming’s retirement in 2011 failed to hit the heights he did, in ability or popularity.
The same can’t be said for basketball players from the rest of the world. Deep in the heart of Texas, the San Antonio Spurs became known to fans as the “foreign legion” in 2014 for their reserve squad of French, Australian, and Argentine players. Those Spurs were perhaps one of the league’s greatest ever bench units, led by Argentina’s Manu Ginóbili. Their dominance culminated in a five-game demolition of the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals, effectively ending Miami’s championship dynasty.
Goldsberry is right that 1992 was a major inflection point in global basketball. But Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, a historian, former State Department official, and the author of Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA, traces the start of the erosion of the United States’ basketball dominance much further back.
Basketball first came to a YMCA gymnasium in Paris in 1893—less than two years after the Canadian American physical education teacher James Naismith (for whom the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame is named) invented the game.
Basketball was added as an official Olympic sport as early as 1936, but the it didn’t hit the mainstream in Europe until after World War II, when Greece and the former Yugoslavia invested in the sport as part of nation-building efforts, and young people backpacking across Europe brought the sport from east to west. “That’s where we start to see the first real cross-cultural exchange in basketball know-how, tactics, and techniques,” Krasnoff wrote in an email to Foreign Policy.
The women’s game was picking up, too. By the late 1960s, the French Clermont Université Club, with its stars Jacky Chazalon and Élisabeth Riffiod, were in the middle of a fierce rivalry with Soviet teams, and American women—who didn’t have a league at home—were also going to Europe to play.
Until the mid-1990s, though, the flow of foreign talent back into the NBA was still mostly a trickle. There had been Croat Drazen Petrovic and Arvydas Sabonis, a Lithuanian who was drafted in 1986 but didn’t play in his first NBA game until 1995, when he was 30. (His son, Domantas, now plays for the Sacramento Kings). It is true that the 1992 Olympics—the first time that Team USA used NBA players in international competition—“unleashed the floodgates,” Krasnoff said. But there were other factors, too: It was the end of the Cold War, migration was easier, and basketball was aired globally on television.
New foreign players brought new skills and styles with them as well, changing how NBA games were played. For instance, the way that offenses attacked the basket changed from bruising inside play to strategies beyond the three-point arc. European players helped guide the NBA toward better perimeter play, Krasnoff said, “with greater emphasis on teamwork and technique, plays like the Eurostep and the revival of the 3-point shot,” all of which, she said, are hallmarks of European training. (The Eurostep consists of two forward strides intended to sneak past a defender guarding the basket.)
Milwaukee Bucks head coach Glenn Anton “Doc” Rivers, himself a former NBA player, said last season on The Bill Simmons Podcast that U.S. players may be athletically gifted and talented, but they don’t have the same fundamentals as Europeans. The Americans focus on playing and winning games, in his view. The Europeans focus on the basics.
After Ginóbili popularized the Eurostep, his French American teammate Tony Parker made “banana cuts”—curved runs along the baseline—a new fad. The Spurs introduced the “hammer pass,” passing from one corner to another to achieve one of the most efficient three-point shots on the NBA floor.
The 7-foot-tall German former NBA player Dirk Nowitzki, who took up basketball as a teenager and shunned weight training for a regimen focused on shooting and passing, dominated the NBA’s midrange for more than a decade with an unstoppable one-legged fadeaway and carried the Mavericks to the 2011 title over LeBron James. Giannis Antetokounmpo—known as the “Greek Freak”—married Shaquille O’Neal’s physicality with Ginobili’s Eurostep. Another Dallas Maverick, Slovenia’s Luka Doncic, turned the “Dirk” into a step-back jump shot. And France’s 7-foot-4-inch Victor Wembanyama, San Antonio’s latest overseas star, was already considered a generational talent before he ever stepped on the NBA hardwood.
Perhaps the truest sign of the foreign takeover of basketball is the ubiquity of names difficult for many American fans to pronounce, from Markkanen and Mykhailiuk to Cazalon and Vučević. By the opening tip-off of the 2021 NBA season, there were 109 international players, about a fifth of the league, quintupling the percentage that existed before the Dream Team.
The United States is still winning in international basketball competition, but not as easily. Other than the 2004 blip, Team USA has won four straight gold medals in men’s basketball at the Olympics from 2008 onward, capped off by a narrow 87 to 82 victory over France in Tokyo at the COVID-19 pandemic-delayed Games held three years ago.
“The international teams have gotten better, but there’s never an excuse for the United States not to win the gold medal,” said Charles Barkley, a basketball Hall of Famer and a member of the 1992 Dream Team, on a recent podcast interview. “We’ve got the best team; we’ve got the best players—by far.”
In Paris, NBA star Nikola Jokic’s Serbians were no match for Team USA in the opening game of the men’s tournament. Neither was South Sudan, which has no players on NBA rosters, but still played the Americans down to the wire in pre-tournament scrimmages—losing only by a point at the last second.
The U.S. men’s team won every game by double digits until they found themselves down double digits against Serbia in the semifinals on Aug. 8. The squad only eked out a 4-point win in the final minutes. They are set to play France in Sunday’s final. The U.S. women’s team, stacked with its own roster of WNBA stars, is also headed to its final on the same day—a game that could culminate with the squad’s eighth consecutive gold medal.
Team USA may be the only Olympic squad bringing all-star talent off the bench, but Krasnoff, the historian, doesn’t think it’s useful to keep talking about new dream teams. The comparisons don’t do justice, she argued, to the growth of basketball talent in Europe and the rest of the world.
“In order to be truly great, you also need to have great rivals and we’re seeing that play out,” she said.
The United States’ standing in the global basketball power rankings is not in absolute decline—it’s relative to the rest of the world. “It’s not that the United States has gotten worse, it is that the rest of the world has gotten better,” Krasnoff said. “The leveling up of other national teams is a good thing … making the basketball we all see and love that much more interesting for everyone.”
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