“I don’t know anything about Angola, but Angola is in trouble,” said Charles Barkley before the Dream Team’s dominant 116-48 victory in the opening of the 1992 Olympic Games.
Fast forward to 2024, and the U.S. men’s basketball team needed a last-minute layup from LeBron James to beat South Sudan 101-100 in an exhibition game.
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International basketball competitions have become less predictable. Germany nearly defeated the U.S. in an exhibition game last month and eliminated a different roster of American NBA stars in the 2023 FIBA World Cup semifinals. Canada beat the U.S. in the same tournament’s bronze medal game and brought a team with 11 current or former NBA players to Paris.
At the 1992 Olympics, there were 12 players with NBA experience on teams outside the US. This year, there are 69.
Despite the NBA’s wealth of international talent in the tournament, the U.S. is still the -600 favorite to win the gold medal on DraftKings. The Americans won their first two 2024 Olympic contests by 26 points over Serbia and by 17 points in a rematch over South Sudan. The overall lineups in Paris, however, reflect the global development of the sport that has occurred over decades. .
“The Dream Team’s performance in ’92 was the original inspiration for international growth,” said NBA head of international basketball operations Troy Justice. “Fans around the world were inspired by the level of talent and play. Inspiration creates this aspiration for boys and girls around the world.”
There has been a steady increase in non-American players throughout NBA history: from eight on opening night of the 1983-84 season to 73 in 2003-04 and eventually to a record 125 in 2023-24, counting those with two-way contracts. .
It was not just the quantity of international players that increased, but also the quality. The last six NBA MVPs have been awarded to players born outside the United States, with the 2024 MVP runners-up, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Luka Dončić, hailing from Canada and Slovenia, respectively.
Over the past decade, the biggest spikes have come from Canada (eight players in 2013-14 versus 26 in 2023-24) and Africa (seven players in 2013-14 up to 15 in 2023-24).
“In the case of Africa, what contributed enormously was the focus on making the game accessible to young people, getting more young people to play the sport,” said the president of the Basketball African League (BAL), Amadou Gallo Fall.
The NBA, together with FIBA, launched Basketball Without Borders (BWB) in Africa in 2003. Over the years, 19 BWB Africa camps have reached more than 1,600 participants, 13 of whom have played in the NBA. One of them was Luc Mbah a Moute, who eventually returned to Africa and helped discover NBA All-Stars Pascal Siakam and Joel Embiid.
The league has continued its investment in the continent, opening its African headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2010, as well as offices in Senegal (2021), Nigeria (2022), Egypt and Kenya (2023) more recently. NBA Academy Africa, a basketball training center in Senegal, opened in 2017 and has worked with dozens of future NCAA Division I players and two NBA players. The BAL, a professional league with 12 teams across the continent and founded as a partnership between FIBA and NBA Africa, just concluded its fourth season in June.
The rapid global expansion of the talent pool has not been without problems. For the past 15 years, a cottage industry of Kanye West-like night prep schools Donda Academy emerged in the US, attracting international teenage players with promises of exposure to college recruiters and a chance at a professional career. While players like Embiid have successfully navigated American prep schools as a stepping stone to the NBA, many others have been duped by less legitimate, or even completely fake, “gyms” whose practices have been targeted for human trafficking. investigations. Young international players have experienced inadequate living conditions while attending unaccredited schools in the U.S. and have been implicated in student visa fraud that has left some deported after being left aside by these pirate preparations.
The vast majority of NBA Academy Africa graduates are able to advance directly to the next level, be it university or professional, bypassing the preparatory school stage entirely. “We recognize that as a professional sports league we have resources, but we are not in a position to overhaul entire systems,” said NBA head of international basketball development Chris Ebersole. “Our vision with the Academy is that we can create a system where we can provide that education and provide a lot of structure and infrastructure.”
South Sudan’s team for the 2024 Olympic Games is a testament to the foundations the NBA has laid in Africa. Khaman Maluach, who touched a basketball for the first time in 2019, is an NBA Academy Africa alumnus who also attended BWB in 2023, where he was named camp MVP, and played several seasons at BAL. The Duke commit and highly ranked 2025 NBA Draft prospect is representing his country in Paris along with two other BAL players: Nuni Omot and Majok Deng.
South Sudan is the youngest country in the world, having gained independence in 2011 and experiencing civil war from 2013 to 2020. Former NBA All-Star Luol Deng served as president of the Sudan Basketball Federation of the South since 2019 and has funded many aspects of the program out of his own pocket due to his belief in basketball’s ability to catalyze unity and national pride.
The NBA, whose mission is to “inspire and connect people around the world through the power of basketball,” says it has similar goals in Africa that go beyond simply creating a pipeline for future NBA players.
“Yes, the number of players from Africa [in the NBA] it will certainly continue to increase, but we also want to have the opportunity for some of the talent coming out of development programs across the continent to stay here and play at a very, very high level,” Fall said. “We want this to become an engine of economic growth for the continent.”
The league insists on developing basketball systems in both established and emerging markets. Justice says he is less focused on the number of international players in the NBA but rather the number of countries represented, which was 40 on opening night of the 2023-24 season – notably, not a significant increase from 34 in 2003-04 .
“I wouldn’t say there will be a country or a region where the next wave [of talent] will come, but the number of 40 countries will expand,” Justice said. “What we will start to see more of are NBA and WNBA players coming from non-traditional markets, where they could be the first from their country to make it big.”
This would give fans in new markets opportunities to experience and interact with the NBA. “We will have more countries represented in the league,” Fall said. “That growing footprint around the world is what will be notable.”
Meanwhile, we will have an Olympic men’s basketball tournament more exciting and competitive than fans saw in 1992 in Barcelona.
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