(NewsNation) — The 2025-26 NBA season starts tonight, and a record-setting 135 international players from a record-tying 43 countries across six continents are on opening-night rosters, according to a release from the NBA.
Basketball has exploded in global popularity over the past decades, and now every team has at least one international player on its roster. 15 current international players have been named to all-star teams, indicative of the fact that several of the NBA’s top players were born outside the United States.
Canada leads the way with 23 non-U.S. players, followed by France with 19 and Australia with 13. The Atlanta Hawks tied an NBA record with 10 international players on their roster.
Past 7 MVPs have been awarded to players born outside of the U.S.
Since the 2018-19 NBA season, every regular-season Most Valuable Player award has been won by a player born outside of the United States:
- Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder was born in Canada and won the MVP in 2025.
- Nikola Jokić of the Denver Nuggets was born in Serbia and has won the MVP three times in 2021, 2022 and 2024.
- Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers was born in Cameroon and won the MVP in 2023.
- Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks was born in Greece and won back-to-back MVPs in 2019 and 2020.
Record number of European players in NBA
This season, a record 71 players from Europe are on opening-night rosters, coinciding with recent talks to establish a new NBA-style league there.
“The state of the game of basketball in Europe, I think, is fantastic,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said last month. “They have their own traditions, which we of course want to maintain, but we think there’s an opportunity to bring an NBA-style league to the continent and to take the game to another level.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report