IT’S LATE IN the evening on Jan. 15, and Tony Parker is walking down a hall at Frost Bank Center in San Antonio. The sleeves of his mauve bomber jacket rolled up, he stops every few steps to soak in adulation from fans paying homage to the greatest player in French basketball history.
The Hall of Fame point guard and four-time NBA champion represents the past for both the San Antonio Spurs and the country of France.
Just a few feet down the hall, Victor Wembanyama — the present and future of the franchise, French basketball and possibly the entire NBA — waits for second-half instructions in the locker room after blocking eight shots in helping San Antonio build a 63-51 halftime lead over the Memphis Grizzlies.
The lead doesn’t last, as Wembanyama and the Spurs fall victim to their inexperience and lose by 14. Two nights later, they again lose at home to the Grizzlies — this time without star guard Ja Morant — by 28.
Still, the 21-year-old’s faith in the Spurs franchise remains as solid as ever, despite a 22-win rookie campaign and the club’s most recent struggles — losers of six of their past seven games — headed into the 2025 NBA Paris Games, which will tip off Thursday against the Indiana Pacers.
“The organization has proven over and over they’re willing and they’re doing the right things,” Wembanyama said Friday after the Spurs’ 140-112 loss. “The most important thing is trust and also communication. It’s a balance and the will [between both parties] to keep that balance over the years. This is what’s going to pay off.”
During the predraft process, in which Wembanyama was not only considered the consensus No. 1 pick but a generational prospect, he professed on multiple occasions that San Antonio was exactly where he wanted to be.
He had good reason, given San Antonio’s track record for prioritizing international scouting, its three-decade run of developing stars from all over the world, including France, and the five NBA titles and 22 straight postseason berths dotting a multiple-era dynasty that remains unrivaled in modern NBA history.
So, when the time came for the Spurs to make their selection in the 2023 NBA draft, dreams became reality.
“The greatest thing I could have asked for,” Wembanyama said. “The greatest franchise, the greatest team, the greatest culture, the greatest fans.”
Parker, for his part, experienced somewhat of a different dynamic: selected by the Spurs with the 28th pick in 2001, at a time when taking a French point guard in the NBA draft was unheard of.
Fellow Frenchman Boris Diaw, who won the 2000 FIBA Under-18 Championship alongside Parker and captured an NBA title with San Antonio in 2014, told a story at Parker’s jersey retirement ceremony with the Spurs in 2019 that encapsulates the atmosphere Wembanyama is experiencing now.
Diaw recalled that while he hadn’t yet become an NBA player, Parker — the then-19-year-old Spurs rookie — invited him to coach Gregg Popovich’s home for Christmas dinner.
Diaw found it odd, he said, that a coach of Popovich’s stature would ask his first-year guard over for a meal on Christmas, and odder still that the rookie could invite his own guests. During that dinner, the story went, somewhere in between the main course and dessert, Parker and Popovich disappeared.
“I go look around the house,” Diaw said. “Then I see Pop doing film with Tony about the game the night before. Pop was yelling at Tony.
And I’m like, ‘Wow.’ So, in the same night, you could have the family setting, all the loving and care, and at the same time caring about making Tony a better player on Christmas night. That’s when I knew Tony was in good hands and that his career was going to be great.”
More than two decades later, that culture remains — for this next generation.
THE CURRENT NBA landscape features a record-tying 14 French players, including two Spurs in Wembanyama and Sidy Cissoko, the 44th pick of the 2023 draft.
The 2024 draft marked the first time three players from the same country outside of the United States were selected in the top 10 in France’s Zaccharie Risacher, Alexandre Sarr and Tidjane Salaun. Teams picked up a record four French players in the first round and five overall.
“Every time I go to a city, I’m like, ‘Oh man, there’s a French guy,'” said Washington Wizards forward Bilal Coulibaly, the seventh pick in 2023 and Wembanyama’s former teammate on France’s Metropolitans 92. “It’s like we really did something.”
Popovich and the Spurs saw this day coming and the longtime coach expressed as much prior to suffering a mild stroke in November that has kept him away from the team. Over the years, the Spurs’ roster has featured a total of seven Frenchmen, including three (Parker, Diaw and Nando De Colo, who was traded to the Toronto Raptors in February 2014) on the 2013-14 squad that ultimately hoisted San Antonio’s most recent Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy.
Having majored in Soviet studies at the Air Force Academy, Popovich speaks Russian and Serbian, and he played on military basketball teams that took him all over Europe. Popovich saw firsthand the talent his European counterparts possessed.
So, when Popovich entered the NBA in the late 1980s as an assistant coach, he was surprised the league hadn’t fully tapped into the European talent pool. Popovich recalled seeing Hall of Fame coach Don Nelson when he traveled to scout the European championships in Cologne, Germany, thinking he was in precisely the right place to uncover talent.
“There was a prejudice [against European players],” Popovich told ESPN. “A little hesitancy because they wouldn’t play defense, won’t assimilate, they won’t like it here. We’d played against some of these guys, and they were awesome. So, I knew they were out there. They were everywhere.”
Now, some 30 years later, opening-night rosters featured 125 international players from 43 countries.
Brett Brown has been with the Spurs organization for a decade, over two stints, serving as an assistant coach from 2007 to 2013 before returning in 2022. He recalls a dinner years ago that made him realize the extent to which foreign-born players had become mainstays of NBA rosters — and why.
“I’m sitting at a dinner table with Boris Diaw, Tiago Splitter, Patty Mills, Sean Marks, Manu Ginobili and me,” Brown told ESPN. “I look around and there’s Argentina, there’s France, New Zealand, Brazil, there’s Australia. They’re heavyweights on the global basketball scene, stars outside of the country. I think they see the world and the sport just from a much wider lens. They really sort of see things differently.”
IT WASN’T EASY for Parker. There were plenty of instances when, as a rookie, he would stand in the showers after practices — ones in which he had endured some type of verbal lashing — with tears welling in his eyes. He wondered if he would ever be able to satisfy the famously hard-driving Popovich, even though Parker had been named the Spurs’ starting point guard just five games into his first season.
“I make the joke, but it’s true,” Popovich said. “I should’ve been arrested for abuse [for] the things I did to that kid.”
Regardless, Parker found a home over 17 years with the Spurs en route to setting a franchise record for assists (6,829) and earning top-five rankings in games played (1,198), scoring (18,943 points) and steals (1,032).
Parker, a six-time All-Star and member of four All-NBA teams, became the first European to win NBA Finals MVP (2007).
“During training camp and the first couple of games, I was really tough on him, gave him a lot of things to think about, a lot of things to do,” Popovich said. “And he showed he had the fortitude and courage to do this. I gave him the ball and said, ‘This is yours. Figure it out.'”
Parker did just that.
“French basketball is Tony,” Diaw said. “Tony is French basketball. There is no way you can talk about French basketball without the name of Tony coming up.”
It almost didn’t. If Popovich had his way initially, perhaps France wouldn’t currently be the most represented European country in the NBA for each of the past 18 seasons.
Parker’s first workout with the Spurs left Popovich with the impression the Frenchman was “too soft” to excel in San Antonio. Parker took part in a private predraft workout with the Spurs in Chicago against former front office employee Lance Blanks, who dominated from start to finish.
Parker’s dispassionate reaction afterward made matters worse.
Popovich was done and wanted to move on. But Sam Presti, current executive vice president and general manager of the Oklahoma City Thunder, wouldn’t let him. Presti was working for the Spurs in the scouting department under current San Antonio CEO R.C. Buford and had spent extensive time prior to the 2001 draft studying Parker’s game. After Popovich explained why he felt Parker wouldn’t fit in San Antonio, Presti cut up a videotape addressing each of the coach’s concerns.
It convinced Popovich to grant Parker one more workout. The Frenchman excelled.
“R.C. was ahead of his time,” Parker said during his jersey retirement ceremony. “Him and Sam Presti. You took a gamble on me. I was terrible in my first workout with the Spurs. Pop didn’t want to hear about Tony Parker. He was like, ‘I’m done. I want another point guard.’ And R.C., man, you kept talking to Pop, kept showing him the videos. I’m so lucky you gave me a second workout and I was able to show you I wanted to be a Spurs point guard.”
For Wembanyama, the stakes are even higher in leading a franchise beginning its next evolution, fresh off opening a new, $500 million training facility with plans to build a new downtown arena. While Parker started the international movement in San Antonio, the Spurs need Wembanyama to carry it into a new generation — one, once again, of sustained dominance.
TWO DAYS AFTER he was drafted, Wembanyama sat at a dais in San Antonio, the latest international phenom to tantalize the NBA and the latest French prospect to don the black and silver Spurs uniforms.
Next to him stood a 58-inch-tall Lego replica of the Eiffel Tower.
It took a team staffer 15 hours to build the 10,001-piece set, which a Spurs executive purchased the prior winter for $629.99 not knowing the club would wind up drafting Wembanyama No. 1 months later — and unaware of the Frenchman’s love for Lego sets.
The organization admittedly first started fantasizing about drafting Wembanyama four years before it pulled the trigger on the selection.
“It’s amazing,” said Minnesota Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert, a four-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year who grew up in Saint-Quentin, France. “It’s great for all the people that paved the way, the first ones, the first generation like Tony [Parker], Boris [Diaw]. All these guys showed Americans, showed the NBA, they could dominate in this league and be great players in this league coming from Europe. Now, we have kids that are not scared about dreaming about the NBA. All the kids that are courageous enough to dream about that can have role models they can look up to and then try to follow their path.”
While five players from France landed on rosters after the 2024 draft, four more — Nolan Traore, Noa Essengue, Joan Beringer and Noah Penda — should figure prominently in the 2025 draft.
“We love basketball,” the Wizards’ Coulibaly said. “At first it was soccer. Then to see all the greats like TP, Boris Diaw, all these guys getting rings and everything. It was like, ‘Oh man, I want to do this too.'”
Wembanyama said he believes there’s even more room to grow for his country, especially on the international stage. He played on the French squad that fell to Team USA in the gold medal game at the Paris Olympics in August.
“It’s something I’m very proud to be a part of, these waves of players coming,” Wembanyama said. “But I think we’re not there yet. What we lack right now is international titles for French basketball. This is a great adventure. But French basketball is not near its full potential right now.”
Neither is he.
Still, he is confident in San Antonio’s plan to build a winner around him for the long haul.
“I’m confident with the group we have, the people in the organization and the people I’ve been on board [with since] day one,” Wembanyama said. “We know this season it is not going to be a straight line. It’s going to be ups and downs. This is not easy. We’re not going to go 82-0 in a season. We’re going to have losing streaks. But I’m very confident in the will that my guys have.
“The long term is never being questioned.”
