Joakim Noah Explains Why the Future of French Basketball Is 'Beautiful'

Kristen Wong | Sep 11, 2024

Joakim Noah, Jalen Rose attend day ten of the 2024 US Open Tennis Championships at the USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center on September 4, 2024 in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York City. / Photo by Jean Catuffe/GC Images

All eyes were on the USA-France men’s basketball Olympic gold medal match at the Paris Games this summer. While some fans were left starstruck by Steph Curry’s dagger threes that helped lift Team USA to a 98-87 win, retired NBA star Joakim Noah viewed the game from a wholly different perspective—that of an older, grizzled Frenchman.

Noah’s diverse background makes him more unique than most, as his father was a French professional tennis player and his mother was crowned Miss Sweden. The former Chicago Bulls All-Star center holds citizenship in three countries but chose to represent France for his international career. 

Noah was part of the French team that won silver at the EuroBasket in 2011, but he unfortunately missed his only shot at Olympic action in the 2012 London Games due to injury. Fast forward to over a decade later, and the 39-year-old is liking what he sees from the French men’s national basketball team.

Noah spoke with Sports Illustrated in an exclusive interview at the U.S. Open on behalf of Emirates, the official global airline partner of the NBA and the first title partner of the Emirates NBA Cup (formerly known as the NBA In-Season Tournament). 

“I think it’s great when the best players in the world get on the same stage,” Noah said of the USA-France gold medal game. “Team USA is a team that when they play, the rest of the world watches. I can see the importance of that now that I’m not a player anymore.”

“But for me, I was just looking at it in light of all those young French kids who had the opportunity to watch that big stage game and how much it’s going to inspire the next generation of French athletes,” continued Noah. “When you have an opportunity to play with [Victor] Wembanyama for the next 10 to 15 years, and the talents that we have coming up, there’s something that’s going on in France that they’re doing on the grassroots level that’s working. It’s a small country compared to the U.S., and we have a lot of top talent. So, I think it’s beautiful to see that something in the grassroots system over there in France is working and we have to keep an eye on that.”

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Durant (7) embraces France power forward Wembanyama (32) after the men's basketball gold medal game during the 2024 Summer Games / Rob Schumacher-Imagn Images

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The 2024 Games marked the fourth time in Olympic history that France reached the men’s basketball final and came up short, losing each time to the Americans in 2020, 2000 and 1948.

Yet the future of French basketball indeed appears to be in good hands, with not only San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama coming into his own but also NBA rookies Zaccharie Risacher and Alex Sarr poised to make a name for themselves in years to come. 

The NBA landscape does, after all, seem to be trending French. Risacher and Sarr went back-to-back at the top of the 2024 NBA draft in June, making it the second straight year a French player went No. 1 overall. Compatriot Tidjane Salaun was then selected at No. 6 overall by the Charlotte Hornets, which marked the first time a non-U.S. country had three top-10 picks in the same draft.

While the French rookies face a long and grueling journey ahead of them to earn a national team call-up, they could perhaps take a page out of Noah’s book on competition. As a 13-year veteran who’s played with and battled against some of the best players in the NBA during his 2010s heyday with the Bulls, Noah knows as well as anyone what it means to put in the work.

“Competition on the biggest stage is something that I miss,” Noah said. “You have to know your reasons why and have emotional intelligence and balance even when your body’s going crazy because of adrenaline or a situation that happened on a court. The more you compete, the more you build a relationship with who you are as a competitor.”