NBA's overseas pipeline was built in 1990s

MINNEAPOLIS – This summer, I spoke on the phone at length with Donnie Nelson about international scouting in the NBA and his history with basketball overseas. For every one of my questions, he had a story, an emotional memory he recalled as if it were yesterday. I was looking for facts, and what I got were people and places and the sense of a passion that once drove a young man’s career.
 
I was skeptical, a bit, of the investment and love that Nelson was talking about. International scouting is a business, and he was treating it like philanthropy. He barely spoke of basketball, really, and instead told me about streets and buildings, museums and landmarks. At first, I didn’t get it, but now I think I do, at least a little. When Nelson was coming up, international scouting than just a business, and to understand Donnie Nelson is to understand how far basketball has come.
 
On Friday evening, I indulged my love for solo movie theater outings and went to see The Other Dream Team, a documentary about basketball in Lithuania and the country’s national team in 1992. Nelson figures prominently into the latter half of the story; he played against Lithuanian star Sarunas Marciulionis while on a Christian touring team and later, as a scout for Golden State, orchestrated his signing with the Warriors. Marciulionis became the first Soviet player to compete in the NBA, and Nelson became the early godfather of basketball in Europe.
 
Nelson went on to serve as a coach on the 1992 Lithuanian team, which beat Russia in dramatic form to win a bronze medal. He and Marciulionis raised money to fund the team largely through a sort of cannabis-drenched sponsorship from the Grateful Dead, who allowed the team to wear tie-dyed Deadhead shirts and sell them in Barcelona. The documentary tells the tale of that team and its meteoric rise onto the world stage, and it’s the kind of narrative that’s almost too perfect to be true.
 
But beyond the story, The Other Dream Team is perhaps most captivating in the way it screws with our concept of time. The portions of the United States shown in the documentary are surprisingly similar to today, a little less gray and in a bit better shape, with a few more mustaches, shorter shorts and grainier video. There’s David Stern at the NBA draft calling out picks, and even in 1986, the crowd was booing. There’s Jordan and Bird and Magic on the real Dream Team, men who today still figure big time in the world of basketball. In those moments, it feels like 1992 was a couple of years ago. I feel like I remember those Olympics, even if I don’t, even if at the time I was just a babbling 4-year-old with a penchant for asking adults to solve math problems for me. But the characters – at least on the U.S. side of the story – are so transcendent that we’re tricked into thinking this happened yesterday.
 
And then they flash to Lithuania and Soviet Russia. We see the apartment where Marciulionis lived, the images of Nelson meeting with him in a windowless room that was likely bugged, where they wouldn’t have dreamed to mention a contract or the NBA. We see tanks and hear stories about how the players would stuff their suitcases full of foreign goods to smuggle home and sell.
 
No, this was not a few years ago. This was a lifetime ago, another era. Time seemed disparate; it was the modern age of basketball in the United States and almost like a different century in Eastern Europe. It was light years from today, when the Timberwolves’ roster boasts players from Spain, Russia and Montenegro.
 
When the Warriors signed Marciulionis in 1989, television stations couldn’t even spell his name properly. When Portland drafted Arvydas Sabonis in 1986, fans erupted in dismay. No way was a player coming to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. That just didn’t happen, and in his case, it really didn’t, not until long after the communist bloc crumbled and he was too far past his prime.
 
Since the days of this other Dream Team, the gap has narrowed. Marciulionis and Sabonis now cruise around Lithuania in luxury cars and Ralph Lauren shirts. They still fit in their home country, but not quite like they did, and in this modern world of Eurocamp and international scouting, they don’t have to. It’s easy now. Everything is a bit more American. An NBA team wants a Russian kid, and it signs him. It wants a Montenegrin, and it drafts him. It’s all done in these tidy little boxes, and the high drama is gone.
 
But signs of it remain. Twenty years later, the eyes of many of the Lithuanians in the documentary are still red-rimmed, as if they’d cried before the interviews remembering everything it took to get to here. Or maybe it’s just that all those years of struggle left their mark. Their laughter trails off when they remember how gravely serious the stories we find funny today once were. Basketball meant something to them, perhaps more than it did to the Dream Team. It was about a country they loved and a talent their occupiers had coopted for so many years. It was about pride and place, and it makes everything we do today seem so insignificant.
 
My first semester in college, I was gut-wrenchingly homesick. It was the fall of 2006, and my Cardinals had a chance to win the World Series for the first time in my life. My St. Louis friends and I met up for every game, and on the night the Cardinals won it all, we went running, screaming, shrieking outside into the heart of Georgetown’s campus. Somehow, nearly every Cardinals fan coalesced on a terrace, oblivious to everything but the place we called home and what sports had done for it.
 
That’s the closest I’ll ever come to understanding how sports can transform identities and roots, and it’s still a long way from what these men went through. That’s what I struggle to wrap my mind around – how they can even put what they went through into words.
 
Now, when I watch Alexey Shved, Nikola Pekovic and Andrei Kirilenko, I’ll be more awed, more grateful, not for what they do, but for where they are. The barriers are gone, and they got here the easy way. They’re lucky. But a little part of me is sad. So much of what make sports important come in the doors they open and the worlds they can change, and the places where that’s still possible are shrinking every day. As the world becomes fairer, the stories get weaker.
 
And that’s why we’re riveted by history like this. That’s why Donnie Nelson keeps talking, keeps reliving the past 30 years of his life. He was part of something special, and so much of the NBA today is a continuation of the inroads made back then. I wish I could have seen it. I wish I’d been a more astute 4-year-old.
 
But at least I can begin to appreciate it.


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