This year’s NBA Finals are underway, along with the end-of-season accolades, both of which sport a very global face for today’s NBA workforce is truly international. By January 2023, nearly one in three players were born outside of the United States. It’s a trend that accelerated significantly as the first generation inspired by the U.S. Dream team crafted careers in the NBA and showed kids back home how to spin hoop dreams into reality.
That reality is now Giannis from Greece. Nikola from Serbia. Luka from Slovenia. Joel from Cameroon. Shai from Canada.
The league’s international cadre serve as informal ambassadors in numerous ways, whether for the game or the world’s elite basketball championship. But it is important at this juncture for those who study today’s NBA to be aware of this DNA. For while it is indeed a U.S.-based professional sports league, it is now a global one—not solely an “American” one.
Thus, I found Dr. Valérie Bonnet’s presentation on “Sport, Cultural Industry and Soft Power” vis-à-vis the NBA at the University of Lausanne’s recently concluded sports diplomacy seminar series interesting on several levels.
First, her note of the NBA’s use as a soft power cultivator for the United States. Today it is broadcast in some 215 countries and territories and enjoys significant commercial and merchandising opportunities around the planet. The close ties between the NBA and U.S. cultural influencers, like the film director Spike Lee or rappers, were also formative, she argued, to shape the league as a cultural and sporting juggernaut—and thus a soft power builder. She noted that the NBA’s real power also comes from its storytelling capacities, pulling the thread through its marketing, political communication, and management communications.
Second, Bonnet dissected how, historically, U.S. basketball is based on founding American myths. She cited such myths as the “E pluribus unum,” “one nation under God,” “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” “Manifest Destiny,” the “frontier mentality,” and the “self-made man” concept as being part of the NBA’s storytelling. She argued that basketball has “American morals” and that the league in its storytelling “transforms players into moral characters” citing the examples of Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neil, and LeBron James.
That may be true of past eras, but not today. Find me a player today that tells the story of making it in the world’s elite basketball league purely on their own. Between coaching, community, and mentorship, it takes a small village to produce elite and professional basketballers.
Moreover, since the NBA opened the floodgates, there’s been an influx of players from all corners of the planet. Now it is common that they are all-stars, MVPs, NBA Champions and Finals contenders who are not born and trained in the United States. They bring with them their own brand of savoir-faire, hoops proclivities, and way of playing ball, even as they share passion for the game, pizazz on-court, and the league’s culture. It would be hard to convince me that Giannis espouses the American morale of the frontier mentality.
To learn more about him, you should read Mirin Fader’s excellent Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an NBA MVP
There needs to better communication about today’s global NBA by content creators, media, as well as by scholars. And there’s also a need to better write this into the history books and their first draft (i.e. journalism accounts), so that future, scholars, practitioners, and industry professionals can more accurately understand, analyze, work with or within basketball. When one of the buzziest players of the 2023 NBA Finals is a Serb and the likely number one 2023 NBA Draft prospect is a Frenchman, we’re in an entirely different ballgame, which necessitates different ways of relating to and about this league.