Pau Gasol's legacy: Lakers hero, NBA star, international legend
With the NFL season in full swing and the MLB playoffs starting up, it might have been easy to miss it: Pau Gasol announced his retirement from basketball on Tuesday.
In a way, the timing was pure Gasol, as the man somehow quietly and humbly compiled a career that included 19 NBA seasons, six All-Star selections and a pair of high-profile championships with Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers.
Gasol took a moment to give a special mention to Bryant and point out the impact the late superstar had on his career.
The Lakers announced that they will retire Gasol’s No. 16 — as Bryant once predicted — putting him in the rafters beside Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and other legends.
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But when you look at Gasol’s impact, you have to look well beyond the Lakers or even the NBA. That's because the Spaniard, who was drafted No. 3 overall by the Atlanta Hawks in 2001 and traded to the Vancouver Grizzlies on draft night, played a large role in the growth of his sport on the international stage.
Much of the credit for the growth of international basketball tends to go to 1992’s "Dream Team," and rightly so. That squad of legends — Magic, Michael, Larry, Chuck, Stockton, Malone, etc. — inspired players abroad to chase the NBA dream.
That led players such as Dražen Petrović and Šarūnas Marčiulionis to leave the comfort of the European leagues to test the basketball waters in America. The success of those players in turn inspired a new generation of athletes coming up in Europe and elsewhere to chase the NBA dream.
That generation included players such as Dirk Nowitzki of Germany, Manu Ginobili of Argentina, Tony Parker of France, Yao Ming of China and, of course, both Pau Gasol and his brother, Marc, of Spain.
The success has come in a slow, steady build. Yao was the No. 1 overall draft pick in 2002. Nowtizki won a title with Dallas in 2011. Ginobili and Parker teamed up to win four of them in San Antonio. And the Gasols made Spain a consistent threat on the international stage.
Pau Gasol wasn’t the best player in the NBA, nor was he the best international star. But he won his championships on the biggest stage, teaming with Bryant, the league’s most transcendent star, in Hollywood.
His impact helped inspire the next generation of international players, a generation that is both deeper with overall talent and more top-heavy with star power than ever before.
The numbers back that up:
107: That’s how many international players (from 41 countries) were on NBA rosters to start the 2020-21 season. It’s the seventh straight season with at least 100 international players in the NBA.
6: That’s the number of international players on the 2019-20 All-NBA team, a record.
4: The past four Defensive Player of the Year winners are international players: Rudy Gobert (France) in 2018, 2019, 2021; Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece) in 2020.
3: The past three NBA MVPs have been international players: Antetokounmpo in 2019 and 2020 and Nikola Jokić (Serbia) last season.
In addition to all of this, the NBA is dotted with young, rising stars such as Luka Dončić (Slovenia), Joel Embiid (Cameroon), Domantas Sabonis (Lithuania), Nikola Vučević (Montenegro) and Ben Simmons (Australia).
No one player deserves credit for inspiring the success of all of these players, of course. But Pau Gasol was a key figure in the generation that did and the fact that he did it for so long under the white-hot spotlight of L.A. deserves acknowledgement.
Just look at what some of the international players and teams had to say:
Basketball is increasingly an international sport, and the NBA is increasingly an international league. Gasol walks away from the sport with that growth being a huge part of his legacy.
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