2025-26 Paris Basketball
118 · 2026-05-28 · medium
It's the final week in May, which means it's also the first week of Roland Garros. France doesn't have four different military holidays like America does, much less a Memorial Day, so it's easy to lest-we-forget that RG was a real actual dude. He was a World War I fighter pilot who shot down four German planes, spent three years as a POW, and by most accounts sucked at tennis. It's sort of like if the U.S. Open was called "John McCain." The French Open is the greatest of the four Slams, on the best surface, and that's not just because clay is the same color as a basketball. This is the week for my annual rewatch of the best film ever made about tennis, a time to practice my pepe el trompeta (Olé!), and to admire the majesty of Court Philippe-Chatrier on HBO Max Discovery TNT Eurosport. Yes indeed, I think to myself, that's where I contracted Covid-19 during a boxing match. Nom d'un chien! Was Paris 2024 already two years ago? I recall, as if it were just last week, wandering single-digit arrondissement avenues and seeing life-size billboards of Victor Wembanyama everywhere. I clearly remember the street pop-ups near the Louvre and Pigalle and the Eiffel Tower, each with a regulation ten-foot stanchion and a cartoonishly large boombox blasting French hip-hop. Three or four fresh-faced hunky-boys in black jumpsuits, trimmed in tricolor, invited passersby to shoot-ze-hoop? This was a coordinated metropol-wide campaign to build excitement for Paris Basketball, a club that had sat unnoticed and unloved for six years down in the 13th because footsoccer. But starting in 2024-25 they would be members of the EuroLeague, the highest level of continental basketball, because they'd earned a spot by winning the EuroCup two months prior. La club de la capitale would take over the pretty brand-new Adidas Arena once LeBron James, Stephen Curry and the rest of the Olympians were done with it. On their first try, with a French Taco restaurant as jersey sponsor, PBB finished eighth in the EL with a 19-15 record and made the playoffs. After that, 2018 Big West POY (UC Davis) and 2024 EuroCup MVP T.J. Shorts left for Panathinaikos, taking the Greek Greens to within a game of the 2026 Final Four. Without the best point guard in the EuroLeague, the club took a big step back, finishing 16th this season with a 15-23 record. But the first mission is honor at home. Paris Basketball won the 2025 LNB Élite over the other two domestic EuroLeaguers, ASVEL and Monaco. After finishing 22-8 in the 2025-26 domestic regular season, they're both the defending French champions and the No. 1 seed in the playoffs. This might all be brand-new information to you, even if you're one of those freaks who followed LNB back when all of Wemby's games with Metropolitans 92 were broadcast live on NBA TV. (And oh by the way, the Metros have been relegated twice since he left for San Antonio.) So what in the world would make you pay attention to French pro basketball? I dunno, what if Paris Basketball was coached by Steve Fucking Kerr? L'Equipe took a break from its Roland Garros coverage to publish a story which revealed that during the 2024 Summer Games, Team USA head coach Kerr spoke with club co-founder and former GM speed-dial buddy David Kahn, regarding the possibility of joining the project. This was not a joke! In Wright Thompson's novella-length ESPN.com profile during the will-he-won't-he negotiations with the Warriors last month, there were enough dots to connect. "He told me [he and his wife] couldn’t stop thinking about how cool it would be to live in this city," Kahn told the French press, "and, why not, continue his coaching career here once he left the NBA." Kerr signed for two more years with whatever's left of the GSW golden generation, but that might just be a clock reset to 2028. "It could always happen in the future." Shoot-ze-hoop?
