European players had long been dismissed as a risk by NBA teams. But two picks by the Portland Trail Blazers helped usher in the league\u2019s international era<\/p>\n
NBA commissioner David Stern walked to the podium at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden on 17 June 1986. \u201cFor the last pick of the first round of the NBA draft \u2026 America\u2019s game<\/em>,\u201d Stern said with a hint of a smile, \u201cthe Portland Trail Blazers select Arvydas Sabonis of the Soviet Union.\u201d<\/p>\n Boos rained down from the crowd. TBS hosts Bob Neal and Larry Donald burst into laughter. One Portland journalist said if Sabonis ever played in the NBA he\u2019d jump off the Broadway Bridge. (Sabonis had actually been drafted by the Atlanta Hawks the previous year but it was voided because he was not yet 21.) Portland doubled down two rounds later, selecting Dra\u017een Petrovi\u0107 from another communist country, Yugoslavia.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" European players had long been dismissed as a risk by NBA teams. But two picks by the Portland Trail Blazers helped usher in the league\u2019s international era NBA commissioner David Stern walked to the podium at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden on 17 June 1986. \u201cFor the last pick of the first round … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}