Hollinger: The real story underlying the French talent invasion of the NBA

Tony Kornheiser was ahead of his time.

Three decades ago, when I was an insouciant recent college graduate learning which bars in the D.C. area closed the latest, and Kornheiser was a columnist for the local paper, the Washington Post, he came up with the moniker Les Boulez to make an extremely dull Washington Bullets franchise sound cultured and interesting.

At the time a French player appearing in a Washington uniform was about as likely as a free-solo climb up the Washington Monument; the only non-American Bullets player on the 1995-96 squad was 7-foot-7 Romanian giant and part-time movie star Gheorghe Muresan.

Well, would you just look at Les Boulez — actually, pardonne moi, Les Wizards — now. Helmed by not one but two French lottery picks, including the second selection in Wednesday’s first round of the 2024 NBA Draft in center Alex Sarr and the seventh pick in 2023, Bilal Coulibaly.

That duo is hardly alone. The first pick in Wednesday’s draft was a Frenchman for the second straight year, with the Atlanta Hawks selecting forward Zaccharie Risacher. He’ll be teammates with French-speaking Swiss center Clint Capela. Allez les Faucons!

Wait, there’s more! The Charlotte Hornets selected athletic French forward Tidjane Saluan sixth. Vive les Frelons! New York nabbed another French forward, Pacome Dadiet, at 25. Comment dit-on ce mot “Knickerbocker” en Francais?

On a night when the only other big draft story was the kickoff of the 2025 “Sag For Flagg” campaign (welcome, Nets and Wizards), the French invasion is the biggest news. Three of the top six picks were from France, including the first two; of the 14 players to go in the first seven picks in the last two drafts, five have been from France. Overall, a dozen French players have been chosen in the past three drafts, and we’re not even done with this one yet. At least two more could easily be selected in Thursday’s second round.

That seems notable when there were only two rotation players* in the entire NBA from that country — 35-year-old Nic Batum and reigning Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert — before last June. Among them is rising superstar Victor Wembanyama, and there’s more on the way: France’s 2025 draft class includes a likely high lottery pick in guard Nolan Traore and two other potential first-rounders in forward Noa Essengue and guard Noah Penda.

(* — Killian Hayes doesn’t count)

This, of course, is part of the growing internationalization of the NBA. The last six MVP trophies have gone to players from overseas; the top four players in the voting in 2023-24 were from Serbia, Canada, Slovenia and Greece, respectively.

Want more? Germany is the reigning World Cup champion, and after today has three players on the Orlando Magic alone. Canada is sending an entire 12-man squad of NBA rotation players to the Olympics. The Celtics just won a title with key players from Latvia and the Dominican Republic, one year after Denver prevailed with its two best players hailing from Serbia and Canada.

Heck, even teams like Les Boulez aren’t strictly Francophile: They drafted a Swiss guy this year (24th pick Kyshawn George), and a Serbian-Italian last year (42nd pick Tristan Vukcevic).

France is having a moment, though, and it will continue into this summer as the French host the Olympics and chase the gold medal that narrowly evaded them in Tokyo in 2021. (France beat the U.S. in group play, if you’ve forgotten, but narrowly lost to the Americans in the gold medal game.)

But it’s also part of a bigger moment, as international basketball continues to expand its tentacles into what was once an almost exclusively American game. Besides the four French players and one Swiss noted above, Wednesday’s first round also saw a Canadian selected 9th, a Serbian 12th, a German 18th and a Cameroonian 21st.

That’s nine foreign players just in the first round — a stark contrast from even a year earlier, when the 37 picks after Wembanyama featured 33 Americans, two Canadians and just two others.

And we’re likely to get more: Australian forward Johnny Furphy, Nigerian center Adem Bona, Spanish guard Juan Nunez, Swedish forward Bobi Klintman, Belgian guard Ajay Mitchell, Serbian forward Nikola Djurisic, Swedish guard Pelle Larsson and French forward Melvin Ajinca all seem likely to be selected in Thursday’s second round.

That would take us to 17, and that still might not be all — additional players such as German center Ariel Hukporti, French forward Armel Traore, Malian center N’Faly Dante and Dutch big man Quinten Post certainly could be drafted, even if it isn’t hugely likely.

Dig deeper, however, and this is about more than quantity. You’ll see another trend line emerging, both in the emergence of these French players and of the others from overseas: We’re not just talking about the big guys anymore.

Yes, Wembanyama is an incredible freak, standing 7-foot-4 with the skills of a guard, but the more notable development is all the players coming through the pipeline now who aren’t enormously tall. After all, it’s one thing to find kids who stand a foot above all their classmates and put a basketball in their hands; quite another to have a development system that can produce skilled guards and forwards.

In recent years, even as internationals flooded into the league’s big man slots, all but the Canadians were essentially locked out of the league’s perimeter positions, with just a few rare exceptions. Luka Dončić, obviously, is one, but a rare outlier until the last few draft cycles when we’ve seen more talented ballhandling forwards (Franz Wagner, the just-traded Deni Avdija) push into the mix.

So, look at that crop of Frenchmen again. Yes, Sarr is a classic center from central casting, but he’s the only one in the group. Risacher, Salaun and Dadiet all are combo forwards. Traore, their best 2025 prospect, is a point guard, and so is Penda. My list of potential overseas second-rounders above reads similarly: three guards and four sweet-shooting forwards. The other overseas picks from the first round included a Serbian point guard selected in the lottery and two small forwards. And next year’s likely crop, in addition to the Frenchmen, includes highly touted forwards from Spain, Croatia and Russia, and guards from Italy and Lithuania.

And that, my friends, is the story within the story. The French invasion isn’t notable only for having the top two players in the draft, or for a half-decade run where as many as 20 Frenchmen could end up selected. It’s also notable for its distribution of sizes and skill sets, and mirrors something that’s happening with international rosters all over. Remember, the top pick wasn’t an overseas center this time; it was Risacher, a skinny 6-8 combo forward.

So it’s not just about the bigs anymore. Overseas prospects are now showing the je ne sais quoi to rival the North Americans on the perimeter too. Risacher’s selection at No. 1 is just the exclamation point on the trend line.

(Photo illustration of Zaccharie Risacher and Alexandre Sarr: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Laurent Coust / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images; Lev Radin / Anadolu via Getty Images)