Toronto: Milwaukee star Giannis Antetokounmpo returns to the play-offs in Toronto on Saturday afternoon. Except in Greece, where it’ll already be very early Sunday morning.
They won’t mind staying up late in Athens to watch.
Same goes for plenty of other places around the world at this time of year. All eight of the NBA first-round play-off series that start this weekend have international players involved, meaning the game’s global reach will be on full display once again.
And as NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said at the All-Star break, the league expects the international players to keep coming.
“I grew up in Athens not having much,” Antetokounmpo said earlier this season. “And being in the situation and to keep pushing, keep pushing, it’s a great feeling because all the hard work I did in my life, it paid off.”
Now the play-off stage again awaits Antetokounmpo, and plenty of other international players. By the NBA’s count, there’s 54 — including some with dual citizenship like Cleveland’s Kyrie Irving — from 28 different countries set to appear in these play-offs.
San Antonio’s Pau Gasol and Memphis’ Marc Gasol were on opposite sides in the 2015 All-Star Game, have gone head-to-head a slew of regular-season times — and now the brothers will face off in the play-offs for the first time.
The Spurs and Grizzlies are a first-round series in the Western Conference.
Once they actually take the floor, the Gasols will become the sixth set of brothers to meet in the postseason, joining the Mikans (George and Ed, 1949, 1950 and 1953), the Kings (Bernard and Albert, 1983), the Persons (Chuck and Wesley, 1996), the Grants (Horace and Harvey, 1999), and the Wrights (Dorell and Delon, 2016).
If an international player appears in this year’s NBA Finals — almost guaranteed to happen — it would be the 24th consecutive year that at least one player who doesn’t hail from the United States got in the title series.
There’s seven active players in these play-offs with at least one All-Star appearance that the NBA define as being international: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Marc and Pau Gasol, Manu Ginobili, Al Horford, Kyrie Irving and Tony Parker.
Utah’s Rudy Gobert and San Antonio’s Parker are two of the six French-born players in this postseason, and they’ll be asked to carry big roles.
Parker enters these playoffs 115 shy of 4,000 postseason points in his career. He’d be the second international player to reach that milestone — after only his longtime and now former San Antonio teammate Tim Duncan (5,172).
