The past six MVP awards in the NBA have been given to international players, and several new potential stars born outside the United States were slated to be gobbled up in the first round of the draft Wednesday night at Barclays Center.
Nikola Jokic (three), Giannis Antetokounmpo (two) and Joel Embiid have accounted for those half-dozen MVP trophies, and it’s not difficult to envision Luka Doncic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and unanimous 2024 Rookie of the Year Victor Wembanyama joining them in the coming years.
French teenagers Zaccharie Risacher and Alex Sarr were slated to be selected at or near the top of this year’s draft, and either one of them going No. 1 to the Hawks after Wembanyama went first to the Spurs one year ago would have made history.
France would have become the first European country to snag the first pick in consecutive years, joining Canada (Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins in 2014 and 2015) as the only foreign countries to do so.
“These are kids that you would think if you saw Alex or Zaccharie, if you watch them play, you’d think they grew up in Detroit or LA or New York, as opposed to Toulouse or Paris,” former St. John’s coach and current ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla told The Post last week. “If you look around the NBA, there’s been a lot of French kids now, [Rudy] Gobert, [Nic] Batum, [Evan] Fournier, and before that, Tony Parker, and now Wemby, there’s been floodgates of them.
“There’s great development in the French Pro League. And the coaching is very good.
“Oftentimes in the past, they had to adjust to America, they had to adjust to a different kind of coaching, the lifestyle, the food, whatever. And now it’s kind of ahead of the curve in that regard because they’ve pretty much almost been Americanized.”
Sarr, for instance, has played for the Overtime Elite developmental league in the United States and spent last season in Australia.
Risacher has played for Asvel Basket — owned by Parker, a Hall of Fame guard — and JL Bourg in the French Pro League’s top division.
Fraschilla, who describes himself as an “international hoops junkie” on his social media profiles, believes the massive influx of players from around the world dates back to the 1960s and ’70s, when coaches such as Hubie Brown, Dr. Jack Ramsay, Louie Carnesecca and others conducted coaching clinics around the world.
“Obviously, it was kind of like a week-long vacation, too, right?” Fraschilla joked. “You speak to the Italian coaches association, and then you have your free time in Rome or wherever. But these guys imported the game to the world, and then all of a sudden, you’ve got the Dream Team [in 1992] and all of a sudden a young Dirk Nowitzki and kids like him think they can play in the NBA.
“And now, maybe most importantly, coaching around the world has gotten so good, they’re actually teaching the game back to us. … The globe has shrunk because we taught the game to the world, and the world in a crazy way is teaching it back to us.”
The 2023-24 season marked the third consecutive season that opening-night NBA rosters featured at least 120 international players, and the 10th straight season with at least 100.
For the 10th straight year, Canada was the most-represented country outside of the U.S., followed by France (14), Australia (nine), Serbia (seven), Germany (six), Nigeria and Turkey (five apiece).
There have been at least three international players on the All-NBA First Team for four consecutive seasons, including four this year in Jokic, Antetokounmpo, Doncic and Gilgeous-Alexander.
At least 10 international players have been selected in the NBA draft every year since 2000, and at least two have gone in the top 10 in each of the previous 11 years.
Regardless of the order of selection, that latter number was fully expected to hit a dozen Wednesday night.
In addition to Risacher and Sarr, forward Matas Buzelis (Lithuania) and guard Nikola Topic (Serbia) were projected top-10 picks in The Post’s final mock draft.
“When I started doing the draft in 2004, there was not the influx of international players in the league at that time,” Fraschilla said. “This was right after [Pau] Gasol and Dirk, and Tony Parker and [Manu] Ginobli were in the league, but there wasn’t a cascade of talent that’s come in the league the last decade. And now you got almost 25 percent of the league born outside the United States.
“So they see a Doncic or a Wemby or a Jokic, and they come in with much more confidence now than they did 20 years ago because there’s so many players like them that have traversed the same path. They see the mirror image of themselves already in the NBA being successful.”
