Photo Credit: Musée du Basket, Fédération Français du Basketball

LeBron James has helped shape the NBA, but it’s another Cleveland basketballer who sowed the seeds for a hoops revolution that’s produced one of the league’s largest cadres of international players: the Frenchies.

Most people don’t associate France with basketball, but since 1997, when Tariq Abdul-Wahad became the first Frenchman to play a regular-season game (with the Sacramento Kings), the country has consistently supplied young men to the NBA. While the Frenchies are influenced by numerous transatlantic cultural reference points, players and coaches, as well as their own homegrown hoops culture, their presence owes much to an American whose love of the game introduced a very different style of play to 1950s French courts.

Read more at The Athletic or the full article pdf (here)