Justice
The Remarkable Global Diversity of the NBA
A team-by-team look at how professional basketball has become more than just an American sport.
The history of international players in U.S. professional basketball is as old as the NBA itself, when Italian-born Canadian Hank Biasatti joined the Basketball Association of America’s Toronto Huskies in the league’s first year, 1946.
Half a century later, though, basketball was still largely an American-dominated sport. When the iconic Dream Team took the court at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, there were just 21 international players in the NBA.