Nylon Calculus: Appreciating the global NBA
Last week, two separate events reinforced the idea that the NBA is a truly global league. The Rising Stars selections were announced, and the World Team roster featured some of the most promising players in the game, including Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic and Kristaps Porzingis. A few days later, Donald Trump signed an executive order that, among other things, blocks citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days. According to The Vertical’s Adrian Wojnarowski, league officials promptly contacted the State Department for details on how players such as Thon Maker and Luol Deng might be impacted. The contrast between friendly sporting exhibition and serious international politics couldn’t have been starker. But both of them reminded us of how notably diverse the NBA has become.
Of course, this diversity stretches across the entire league, from owners like Vivek Ranadivé to front-office executives like Masai Ujiri to coaches like Ettore Messina to the Denver Nuggets’ “International Basketball Army.” But we see it most prominently on the court — and increasingly so with each season that passes. Indeed, the growth of international players has been such a consistent trend over the past two decades that it’s worth documenting and appreciating here:
In the 1996-97 season, of the league’s 441 players, only nine were born outside the United States. This two-percent figure climbed to 15 percent a decade later. Today, roughly a quarter have international roots, with many of them — from Dirk Nowitzki to Giannis Antetokounmpo — occupying the upper echelon of the game.
These numbers are drawn from NBA.com, and a few important technical notes are in order. The site has some missing data (e.g., Yi Jianlian’s country is unlisted), so I’ve supplemented it with information from Basketball Reference and Wikipedia. The site also has some potentially confusing details. Most notably, Deng is listed under Great Britain, where he has citizenship and experience with the national team, rather than Sudan (or, more precisely, South Sudan), where he was born. Maker appears under South Sudan, even though he has Australian citizenship and, according to ESPN, travels with an Australian passport. In such cases, I’ve kept the data as they are, but I want to highlight them to emphasize that biographical details can be tricky to analyze.
Nevertheless, they are generally reliable and help us understand broad demographic trends. The following animated plot shows the number of players by country for every season between 1996-97 and 2016-17:
This animated plot is similar to the NBA’s 2014-15 Global Map, but covers more years and thus allows us to see changes over time. Here’s the Tableau visualization on which it is based:
The mid- to late-1990s featured a small cohort of international players from various countries in North America, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. They included trailblazing figures such as Steve Nash, Patrick Ewing, Hakeem Olajuwon, Dikembe Mutombo, Tim Duncan and Arvydas Sabonis.
At the turn of the century, the NBA saw greater numbers from these international hotbeds alongside new entrants from South America and Asia. Juan Ignacio Sánchez, Rubén Wolkowyski and Manu Ginóbili made their way from Argentina; Nene followed from Brazil; and Wang Zhizhi, Mengke Bateer and Yao Ming broke through from China. In time, France, Australia, Spain and other nations established themselves as powerhouses in the league.
Next: Roy Hibbert is not finished yet
This brief summary is admittedly crude and does very little justice to the rich history of international representation in the NBA. It’s obviously a topic that requires deeper analysis and careful study. But, for our purposes here, it adequately showcases wide-ranging player contributions from across the globe — a phenomenon that promises to continue shaping how the game is played, how business is conducted, and how the league navigates world affairs.
UPDATE (February 1, 2017)
After the publication of this article, Nylon Calculus obtained additional NBA data showing that the 1996-97 season had 32 international players in the league. This number grew to 68 in 2002-03 and culminated in the record 113 for the current season.
As highlighted in the article, the general trend has been steady growth through the years. At the same time, from an analytics standpoint, the different numbers from various sources emphasize the technical challenges of working with biographical data, particularly when conducting longitudinal work.