The Path of (David) Kahn
In June 2009, two days before the NBA draft, Warriors general manager Larry Riley received a tip from what he calls “a pretty reliable source” that, if true, would be huge for his team.
At the time, the Warriors were mired in a dark era. Other than a blip in 2007, Golden State had missed the postseason every year for the better part of two decades. “I felt like we had to hit on that draft pick,” says Riley.
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In preparation, they’d ranked the players. At No. 1: consensus top pick Blake Griffin of Oklahoma. At No. 2, Davidson’s Stephen Curry. Riley knew the Knicks also liked Curry.
Fortunately for the Warriors, they picked seventh, one spot ahead of New York. What concerned Riley was Minnesota, which held both the fifth and sixth picks and was in the market for a point guard. And if Riley’s source was to be believed, the Timberwolves planned to take not one but two point guards—but neither was Steph Curry. It seemed too good to be true.
On the night of the draft, Riley and the Warriors’ staff watched as Griffin went first. James Harden and Tyreke Evans, both guards, went third and fourth.
“With the fifth pick in the 2009 NBA draft,” David Stern said, “the Minnesota Timberwolves select . . . Ricky Rubio.”
In Oakland, Riley and his team exhaled. They’d also liked Rubio, but not as much as Curry. It was the next pick, No. 6, that mattered.
Then the phone rang. It was the league office, alerting the Warriors they were on the clock.
The Timberwolves are picking Jonny Flynn.
Riley recalls feeling “tremendous relief,” a weight lifted off his shoulders. They had their man.
From there—well, you know what happened. Curry became Steph Curry. Rubio became a borderline All-Star. And Syracuse’s Flynn lasted three seasons in the league, his career derailed by hip surgery. Looking back, Riley knows better than to gloat. “Steph Curry’s made a lot of us look good.”
Indeed he has. But what about the man on the other side of that draft, the one who took Rubio and Flynn, Minnesota general manager David Kahn?
Everyone makes mistakes in the GM business—the Grizzlies took Hasheem Thabeet at number two in that same draft, after all, and roughly one in four lottery picks ever becomes an All-Star. But few, if any, had their tenure defined by it like Kahn. Despite four years at the helm of Minnesota, and two decades in the NBA orbit, his career has largely been distilled into one night, fairly or not. You’ll see it, right at the top of his Wikipedia entry: “Of most note, in the 2009 NBA draft, he twice passed on drafting Stephen Curry, instead choosing 2 other point guards.”
Regardless of how you feel about Kahn or the rest of his checkered tenure in Minnesota—and people tend to have strong opinions—that seems a bit rough, on a human level. How do you make peace with it—or can you? Are there lessons to be learned? And what, if anything, do you do for a next act when it feels like you’ll always be defined by your last one?
In Kahn’s case, the answer lies a continent away, in a burgeoning basketball market, where he is quietly pursuing an audacious plan.
It’s a Saturday night in southeast Paris, and Halle Georges Carpentier arena is humming with 3,000-odd fans. Behind one baseline, teenagers bang drums and chant, as if at a soccer match. ICI TOUT COMMENCE—this is where it all starts—reads a courtside banner.
On this cool night, at the end of April, Paris Basketball is vying for the final playoff spot in the Ligue Nationale de Basket (LNB) Pro A circuit against visiting Roanne. If not NBA-level, the game feels at least NBA-adjacent. Jumping center for Paris is Jeremy Evans, who won the 2012 NBA dunk contest with the Jazz. At point guard is Tyrone Wallace, who’s had stints with the Clippers, Hawks, and Pelicans. Two young French players, Juhann Begarin and Ismaël Kamagate, were recent second-round NBA Draft picks (Celtics, Nuggets); they’re here with Paris to develop until they’re ready to make the jump. The talent is such that, behind one basket, in a “VIP” armchair, Jazz CEO Danny Ainge watches. And, seated at center court in jeans and a lavender button-down, arms crossed tightly and looking somewhat dyspeptic, you’ll find the architect of all this: David Kahn, the president and co-founder of Paris Basketball.
Viewed through one prism, the endeavor can seem very small-scale. Turn on the lights and pan out and you’ll see Carpentier for what it is: an aging, cavernous, multiuse gym in an unfashionable part of the city. “It’s dreadful,” says Kahn.
At the moment, the team practices in a local fitness center, loses money every year, and crowds can be sparse on weeknights. Yes, it plays in the same league as Victor Wembanyama. But that hasn’t meant much financially; the LNB gave away its most recent TV rights for free and, when the NBA wanted to stream Wembanyama’s games to a global audience, the LNB reportedly sold them for all of $138,000. (As Kahn likes to say, “Welcome to France!”) It is a far cry from running a billion-dollar NBA franchise.
That is the present, though. The payoff is what’s to come. Over the next few years, France will serve as the unlikely epicenter of global basketball. In the fall, Wembanyama will make his NBA debut. Next summer Paris will host the Olympics, where the French men’s national team, anchored by Wembanyama, Rudy Gobert and—possibly—Joel Embiid, could be gold medal favorites (Embiid has French citizenship and has yet to decide which country he’ll represent). The women are equally strong, coming off a bronze medal two years ago in Tokyo. To prepare, the city of Paris is building a basketball-specific, approximately 8,500-seat arena in the north of the city—an arena that, as it happens, is also slated to be the home of Paris Basketball, which, somewhat improbably, is the only pro team in the city.
If all breaks right for Kahn and principal owner Eric Schwartz, in a few years celebrities will flock to games, lingering in the second-floor VIP lounge, where, as Kahn likes to point out, players will be contractually obligated to go after games, win or lose. Buoyed by NBA connections and riding a wave of interest in the sport, Paris Basketball could join the EuroLeague and, conceivably, become the premier club in all of Europe. This in turn would make it an obvious choice for NBA exhibitions and, were it ever to come to pass, overseas NBA expansion. And Kahn would be the man in the middle of it all.
Of course, that is a ton of ifs. For now, the team is a money-losing venture peddling an American style of play in a soccer-mad city that has yet to make up its mind about basketball.
Before he moves into a state-of-the-art arena, Kahn is settling for wooden benches.
Johnny Fidelin/Icon Sport/Getty Images
C’mon, we’re already late.” It’s the Friday before the Roanne game, and Kahn hustles me out of Carpentier after practice. He is carrying a shoulder bag, and, as is often the case, his reading glasses are pushed up on his forehead, as if he might survey a spreadsheet at any moment. As we walk to the metro, Kahn ducks into his favorite boulangerie, La Reine des Blés, emerging with a cheese-and-onion bread, which he will eat as we travel underground through Paris, transferring to the 4, then the 12, on our way to the site of the new arena. “No time to sit down for lunch,” he says.
It’s one of many things Kahn will tell me he doesn’t have time for these days. He’s spent the bulk of his time for the last six years in Paris but hasn’t had time yet to find an apartment, instead staying at a Courtyard Marriott. His French is not as good as he’d like. (“It’s embarrassing. I don’t have enough time in the day to practice and study.”) He subscribes to The New Yorker, but they only pile up. (“I don’t have time to just sit at a French café and read The New Yorker. I wish I did.”)
Last fall doctors diagnosed Kahn, 61, with thyroid cancer, and a thin red scar now creases his neck from where they removed a tumor wrapped around a vocal cord, as well as 32 lymph nodes. His latest scan, in March, came back clean. Asked whether the brush with mortality changed his perspective, he says, “I know this will sound silly, but I don’t ever think about it because I’m too busy.” He reconsiders. “To say I never think about it is too strong. Of course, I think about it, but I don’t ever dwell on it. I mean, it is what it is. You move on.” This is a theme he will return to: moving forward.
For now, that means running the team, and meeting with city planners, and traveling constantly, taking temazepam for the jet lag. It took the better part of two years to set up this story, in part because of Kahn’s schedule and in part because he is wary of U.S. media (Kahn hasn’t given in-depth interviews since shortly after leaving the Timberwolves). He says he looks forward to when life will calm down, but “the window for French basketball is now.”
It does seem that way, even if the sport has been around for more than a century, introduced in 1893 by a 22-year-old named Melvin Rideout, one of James Naismith’s original players. American soldiers stationed abroad spread the game during both World Wars and, in time, basketball earned a reputation as the most “cerebral” of team sports (as opposed to the working man’s game, football). Still, that was a low bar. “When I came here in the 1970s, sports were not that popular,” says George Eddy, the Franco-American announcer who became the voice of the NBA in France during the 1980s. “Athletes were seen as dumb and uncultured.”
Then, in the span of four years, Paris hosted Michael Jordan and the Bulls in a 1997 exhibition, the French men’s soccer team won the ’98 World Cup and the men’s basketball team won silver in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, nearly knocking off the U.S.
A generation grew up in the shadow of this success. Soon enough, French players dotted the NBA: Tony Parker, Boris Diaw, Ronny Turiaf, Nic Batum. By the mid-2010s, the LNB encompassed three divisions in 30-plus cities. As in soccer, franchises ascended via promotion (finishing at the top of a lower league) or dropped through the kiss of death: relegation. The elite clubs, such as ASVEL, the Lyon-area franchise owned by Parker—the first owner-player in the history of such things—gained coveted spots in the EuroLeague, which features the best teams from across the continent. Meanwhile, a wave of young talent emerged, especially from the Paris suburbs, home to many immigrant African families (including Kylian Mbappé’s).
It’s on the edge of one of these suburbs where Kahn and I emerge, at the Porte de la Chapelle stop, on the northeastern periphery of the city. Across a four-lane road, a vast structure rises: Adidas Arena, future home of Paris Basketball. The neighborhood is rough. Cracked sidewalks. People lingering on corners. Men selling items out of their trunks. “You have to envision it five years from now,” Kahn says as we walk. Eventually, he hopes, the arena will join Paris’s other iconic buildings, a gleaming, eco-conscious structure welcoming visitors on the drive in from Charles de Gaulle.
Donning hard hats, boots, goggles and gloves, we tour the inside. “Vingt minutes, I promise,” he tells the arena administrator. Electric saws buzz, giant cranes fill the arena bowl and cords dangle from exposed walls. You can smell wet concrete and fresh-cut wood. Sizable LNB arenas are now the norm everywhere in Europe but France; here, only one holds more than 6,500. The Metropolitans 92, where Wembanyama plays, sell out every game, but their arena seats only 3,000. That’s a lot of lost revenue.
This, I’m told, is par for the course for French basketball. Few cities have the fan bases, or arenas, to generate sizable profits. Without TV revenue, “the goal here really is to break even, if you’re lucky,” says Crawford Palmer, a former Duke and LNB standout and, until recently, the GM of first-tier Limoges CSP. “It can be disconcerting to the American mindset.” Part of this is the culture. “Basketball is fighting an uphill battle because of the politics here,” says Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, a historian and author of The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010. She points out that Paris has the 20,000-seat Accor Arena, but it will host gymnastics during the Olympics, relegating Giannis, Wemby and Jokić to an arena half the size (the original plan included hosting games in old arenas without air conditioning). “The Wembanyama effect and the Olympics might change the metric,” says Krasnoff. “For now, they’re fighting a battle for resources. It’s hard to get a spotlight on basketball in France.”
Kahn thinks he can change that.
Kahn opted for Rubio with the fifth pick in 2009.
Jesse Johnson/USA Today Network
The David Kahn brief goes like this: grew up in Portland, oldest of four, son of a lawyer and teacher. Began stringing for the Los Angeles Times at UCLA, paying his way and funding a six-week, postgraduation trip through Europe.
By 1984, he landed at The Oregonian, covering the NBA and networking like crazy. Law school at NYU followed; Stern wrote a letter of recommendation. He worked on NBA Showtime with Bob Costas and Pat Riley, then joined Proskauer Rose, the firm that now has represented the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB in collective bargaining talks. In 1995, Donnie Walsh, then the GM of the Pacers, hired Kahn on the business side. “He struck me as a smart guy,” says Walsh. “We were always on the same wavelength.”
In Indiana, Kahn prided himself on working 12- to 14-hour days. In stories from the era, two adjectives come up repeatedly: “smart” and “intense.” A profile in The Indianapolis Star described him as “always pressed and starched, hair combed back perfectly, as if he’s hung in a closet each night.” (In the story, Kahn described his work drive as “a sickness,” and said he’d like to one day be NBA commissioner.) When the Pacers built Conseco Fieldhouse, Walsh put Kahn in charge of the design stage. Constructed to feel like a basketball version of Camden Yards, with a faux barber shop and retro vibe, it opened in 1999 to glowing reviews.
In 2004, Kahn left the Pacers and led an unsuccessful campaign to bring the Montreal Expos to Portland. He ran G League teams (“much harder than I expected but by the end, I had kind of figured it out”). Then, in ’09, Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor hired him. “No one will outwork, me,” Kahn reportedly told Taylor.
Many sports fans consider becoming sportswriters, and many sportswriters in turn dream of becoming general managers. Kahn actually pulled it off. Plenty rooted for him.
Weeks later Kahn presided over that fateful draft, choosing Rubio and Flynn; reportedly he told staffers they were reminiscent of Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe. Walsh, now the Knicks’ GM, recalls being frustrated: “I did get mad at him. I understand Rubio. But you took Jonny Flynn! He would have been there at 11. And you wouldn’t trade me [the sixth pick] to get Curry.”
Kahn ran the Timberwolves for four years, during which time the team went 89–223. This is not the place to rehash the details—that has been done plenty—but it’s fair to say his tenure was viewed as unsuccessful. In particular, he took a beating from fans and media (“You Realize How Badly the T-Wolves Screwed Up the 2009 Draft, Right?” read a Bill Simmons headline). In exit interviews, he doubled down on his rationale; Kelly Dwyer of Yahoo Sports described Kahn as “absolutely incapable” of saying “my bad.”
Even his defenders added caveats. “If Kahn’s such an idiot, how come the Timberwolves roster is in better shape than your team, with affordable young talent, payroll flexibility and real upside?” wrote Henry Abbott for ESPN. “Call him an iconoclastic crank who’s short of friends and long on big, pompous mistakes. But please, don’t call him the worst GM in the NBA.”
At first, Kahn laid low, teaching business courses at NYU. He wrote for Bloomberg and, briefly, SI.com. In 2016, Schwartz, the CEO of a New York private investment firm, read a Bloomberg column and reached out. He had a notion about buying a G League team.
Kahn had a different idea in mind: What about a French pro team? Ever since that postgrad trip, Kahn had considered himself a “Europhile.” During his time in Minnesota, he’d loaded up on overseas players and, in 2016, he’d visited Parker in France. Now he saw an opportunity.
Starting an expansion franchise would mean beginning at the bottom of the pro league’s ladder system, though. Kahn believed he had a workaround. What if he and Schwartz bought the rights to Hyères-Toulon, a recently relegated Pro B team that had run out of money, then moved it to Paris. No one had ever tried to do this. “It was very controversial,” says Palmer. Says Kahn, “We’re still taking the arrows for it.”
Working in Kahn’s favor: The French Federation of Basketball had long yearned for a team in Paris proper, especially with the Olympics on the horizon. “It was totally nuts to me that there wasn’t a big team in Paris,” says Schwartz. “The fact that we were going to be going into an arena that the city paid for seemed sensible to me, too.”
So they made an offer: $50,000 for the rights to the team, as well as absorbing debt—a layout of about $1.2 million. In 2018, the federation voted it through and, that July, Kahn stood in an ornate Paris ballroom with the deputy mayor, grinning and holding a Paris jersey.
Now, Kahn just needed to assemble a roster, coach and GM in less than two months. The club started with a budget of €2.5 million (around $2.95 million), average for Pro B but not exactly the norm for high-spending international owners. Seven fans showed up for the first game. Says Kahn: “We had one mandate: Don’t get relegated.” The team promptly dropped seven of its first eight before rallying to stay in Pro B.
Years passed. Financial losses piled up. To lure people to the outdated arena, Kahn tried gimmicky, U.S.-style marketing. DJs at the games. A Chinese New Year celebration. An annual Africa Game. An “American Night” where fans wore NBA jerseys. In 2021 he signed the rapper Sheck Wes—known for the song “Mo Bamba”— to a contract. He scored in only one game, but “our social skyrocketed,” says Kahn.
Not everyone loved Kahn’s approach. “To be honest, he hasn’t been welcomed with open arms by the whole basketball community,” says Eddy. “A lot of the French actors in basketball think he’s an American trying to impose his approach on another country. He loves to criticize the French league, and a lot of time the criticism is deserved, but his personality sort of grates on people.” Eddy describes Kahn as “the typical American businessman, an elephant in a china shop.”
Others saw Kahn as a welcome infusion. “I really liked what we saw in the first four seasons,” Yann Casseville, editor of Basket Le Mag, writes in an email. He notes how Kahn hired a French coach, Jean-Christophe Prat, and developed young French players. “It was kind of funny to note that in the second division, this team, run by American owners, was the one where young French guys had plenty minutes, big roles, responsibilities.”
By early 2021, boosted by a late-season surge, Paris gained promotion to Pro A, the top tier, only to flounder the following year. Going into the final game of the 2021–22 season, Paris needed both a win and a loss by a rival to avoid relegation. Kahn’s grand plan rested on a crucial assumption: staying in the A league. Relegation “would have been a thermonuclear disaster,” in Schwartz’s words. On the final day of the season, against the odds, they survived.
It was a win, but one that still left Kahn with no clear arena timeline and a bottom-dwelling roster. He needed reinforcements. That’s when Will Weaver received an interesting email.
Flynn (with Stern) averaged 13.5 ppg as a rookie before a hip injury derailed his career.
Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE/Getty Images
By the spring of 2022, Weaver had built up an impressive, eclectic coaching résumé: assistant with the 76ers and Nets, G League Coach of the Year, coach of the Sydney Kings of the NBL, Rockets assistant. Most recently, he’d been one of the finalists for the Thunder’s head coaching vacancy.
Weaver was also an adventurous soul. He and his wife, Lauren, a child neurologist, had a 3-year-old son, Theo, and loved to travel. So he listened to Kahn’s pitch: “Why not come to Paris, where the lights are bright, the Olympics are coming and every NBA personnel connects before they go wherever?” Adding to the allure: The Rockets were still paying Weaver from his last position. Any Paris salary wouldn’t change his total income.
It was a savvy play by Kahn, one he’d first pitched to Quin Snyder: a visiting hoops professorship that netted Paris an NBA-level coach at a bargain price. Weaver saw the appeal but was wary. He’d heard about Kahn. “I was super bearish on the idea of David,” Weaver says. “His reputation in the ether was two strong thumbs-down.”
Weaver wanted to do his own research, though. “I started calling around to people he’d worked with.” He was surprised. “When I talked to folks, it was mixed positive.” Weaver continues: “I didn’t hear a lot of folks that were like, ‘A--hole, don’t trust him.’ Yells at people? For sure. Climbs on somebody’s ass. Thinks of himself as a reporter and a lawyer, in his heart of hearts, and he’s kind of masquerading as a basketball executive, yes.” Weaver pauses. “I just couldn’t get anybody to say that he screwed me or screwed this person.”
Weaver, 38, liked that Kahn was upfront about his priorities: make the playoffs; develop players; but above all, don’t get relegated. Weaver figured he could do that while building something bigger. Last July he signed on. When writing about the signing, a European reporter borrowed a line from one of Weaver’s mentors with the Sixers, Sam Hinkie: “You don’t get to the moon by climbing a tree.”
The day after our arena visit, Kahn agrees to a sit-down interview. He suggests a crowded café off the Bastille subway stop in central Paris. We sit outside as the city streams by. Pigeons scavenge on the pavement. Young men drink beers and smoke cigarettes. A marching band plays “Seven Nation Army.”
Kahn orders us two espressos and starts from the beginning. “Part of the reason I’m here is the state of sports journalism in the United States. It’s not like that here.”
When Kahn was a reporter, the players and writers stayed at the same hotels, he says. There was mutual respect. Now he bemoans the hot takes and the rush to judgment. A coach loses and immediately people call for his firing. The balance of power in the league has shifted, too. “Whether we like it or not, the players really are the product and have an enormous amount of power right now to dictate their lives.”
GMs no longer have the same oversight. “The people that do those jobs now are the owners.” He lists Antony Ressler in Atlanta and Steve Ballmer in Los Angeles. ”Then below them, they’ll have siloed off into business, basketball and arena.”
This, he says, is what brought him to France. The chance to escape the media negativity and be in charge, fully. “How many times in life can you say you’re able to start something from nothing?”
He lays out a five-year plan for Paris Basketball’s growth. In the States, a team might compete with football, hockey, college sports, and MLS. “All we’re trying to do is become a strong number two to soccer. In a market of 12 million people, that could be a very potent thing.”
Homegrown talent helps. After all, if Wembanyama reaches the heights some envision, the two best men’s players in the two most popular global sports could conceivably both hail from France. Kahn is leveraging this trend. In addition to Kamagate and Begarin, Paris currently carries three French players under 19 who split time with the youth club. This in turn creates NBA connections; this season, the Nuggets essentially embedded an assistant coach, Travess Armenta, to work on Kamagate’s development.
The time difference is another ally. To watch the NBA in Paris means staying up till 3 a.m., as Brooklyn-born Paris guard Kyle Allman Jr. was doing during my visit to watch his Knicks battle the Heat. The French market is captive during the evenings for the LNB. “I remember when I was 15, there was only the final shown on TV,” says Gauthier Denis, Paris’s shooting guard. “Now we can see games every weekend.”
Quality continues to rise. Both Allman and Wallace compare the LNB to NBA Summer League or the G League. Aamir Simms, the team’s stretch four, equates it to playing ACC teams like Duke and North Carolina.
For most of these young men, however, it remains a transient experience. The Americans dream of returning Stateside; the young French hope to be drafted. Only a few, like Denis, see Paris as an end goal. Even Weaver, who’s enjoyed his time in Paris—scouting cafés and riding the metro with tourists headed to Disneyland Paris—won’t return next season (on the weekend I visit the Raptors are interviewing him via Zoom for their head coaching job and, not long after, the Nets will hire him as an assistant).
Indeed, it can seem everyone is trying to get to the U.S. except for Kahn. He tells me he wouldn’t take an NBA GM job if offered one. “No, I’m not leaving, “he says. “This is my favorite city in the world.” He pauses. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been more miserable [than I was in Minnesota].”
What if he could go back knowing everything he does now?
“I wouldn’t have taken the job,” Kahn says.
I ask about the reaction from fans and media. Deserved or not, on a human level that seems like a lot to process.
“Billy Beane made a strong point in Moneyball,” Kahn says. “You can never read anything. I learned he’s absolutely right. . . . Now am I aware? Of course.” He brings up a David Brooks column in The New York Times from 2011 titled “Tree of Failure” that he says he thinks about often. “The idea is that every step forward that you take is a correction of the previous step. That’s how I live my life. I believe that every step forward I’m taking I’m acknowledging a mistake I just made. I make mistakes every day. But I’m moving forward.”
As for the 2009 draft, he offers no regrets and no lessons learned. “You can look at every sport, every decade. It’s part of the nature of the deal. Tom Brady sixth round. . . . Everybody takes their turn in the dunk tank. Nobody is immune from it. Nobody. So move forward. No, there’s nothing to learn from it.”
This is not to say Kahn doesn’t still want to defend his tenure, just not publicly. Repeatedly and at length, he goes off the record. In these moments, he holds forth, explaining who he shouldn’t have hired and who he should have fired, and why certain situations played out. But he’s smart enough to understand there’s no value in saying this now, in print.
What he will say: “I hope that some of the things that I did at other parts of my career, including at Minnesota, may have been a little bit unnoticed.” He cites the concept of leaving a place better than when you arrive. “I am certain”—he leans in over the café table for emphasis—“triply certain, I left the Timberwolves in a much, much better place than when I arrived.”
For what it’s worth, everyone I talked to with Paris Basketball had largely positive things to say about Kahn. “He could not have supported me more,” says Weaver. “I was like, ‘I expected you to be all of a five, and you’re a stone-cold eight!’ I told him, ‘I hope you take that in the way that I mean it.’ You’re supportive and offer your opinion, willing to argue.”
Paris shooting guard Chris Goulding cites the club’s professionalism (“NBA level in that regard”). Evans, the former Jazz center, says he feels “valued.”
Palmer, who has experience as a player, coach, and GM in France, says he’s “pleasantly surprised” with Kahn’s patience and the investment he’s made. Casseveille notes that Kahn’s NBA history is irrelevant here. “I think only die-hard fans know about it. And most people simply don’t care. They want to know what can he bring to the table for French basketball.”
Even Kahn’s critics, like Eddy, are inclined to give him a chance. “Everybody makes mistakes. Look at Portland when they chose Sam Bowie over Jordan. David Kahn is by far not the only NBA executive that pulled a major league boner on draft night.” As for Paris: “We need to give him time with his new gym before we judge the success of this project. But the fact that he has stuck with it is a point in his favor. If it works out, I’ll be the first to say bravo.”
Schwartz agrees. “Listen, I’m not saying he’s the best general manager in the history of the NBA,” he says. But, “He figured out a way to buy for $50,000 a professional basketball team in the biggest economy in Europe, move it to the biggest consumer market in Europe, and create a team that is, largely speaking, along the path that I had planned. Tell me how many of the GMs in the league right now could do that.”
Kahn hopes the attention given to Wembanyama is just the beginning for French hoops.
Sesbastien Salom-Gomis/AFP/Getty Images
On Saturday night, Paris Basketball jumps out to an early lead behind Weaver’s breakneck-paced, NBA-style offense and cruises to a 120–107 victory over Roanne. The crowd stays the whole game, rooting to the end. It’s the upside to the French system; in a season with only 35 games, where point differential counts and no one tanks—lest they tempt relegation—every minute of every game actually does matter. At the same time, secondary narratives play out. I find myself rooting for young Paris players; for Ainge to be looking up when they shine.
After the game—the best win of the season, I’m told—the players jog around the edge of the court, high-fiving spectators. An hour later, at a gym across the street, players and coaches mingle with fans at an after-party. Kahn posts up near the food, glasses on forehead, a plastic cup of chardonnay in hand. Despite the win, he’s found nits to pick: one of his players trying to do too much on offense, another doing too little on defense. At 11:15, he readies to leave; he has flights to catch Sunday.
The following afternoon, as Kahn heads back to the States to check in with the Celtics and Nuggets on their Paris players, I take a taxi to the suburb of Levallois-Perret, where, for another month at least, Wembanyama plays. You feel the energy before you enter—a sense of witnessing history. Like walking into a high school gym in Texas in 1989 and seeing a young Shaq.
The gym is compact, intimate. A bee mascot walks the stands, high-fiving kids; the press seating overflows. Wembanyama lopes down the court, rebounding without jumping and shooting turnarounds with an impossibly high release, like Kevin Durant if he stood on a ladder. “WEMMMM-BEEEEE!” the announcer roars, echoed by the crowd. Drums thump; snippets of “Get Low” and “Highway to Hell” boom. It’s a contrast to the dilapidated Carpentier, and the quiet, if intent, Paris fans. This feels like what French basketball could be, the vision Kahn hopes to achieve. Of course, there is only one Wemby, and he’s about to depart for the U.S.
Then again, France is producing more and more talent. It’s not inconceivable Kahn could find his redemption—the redemption he says he doesn’t think about or need—here, in the form of a gangly French teen he spots one day. Someone who could put Paris Basketball, and Kahn, back on the map.
Until then, he will play the long game. That night he’s in the air somewhere over the Atlantic when, in Sacramento, the Warriors make a furious charge to defeat the Kings in Game 7 of their first-round series. On this night, they are led by a 14-year veteran with a sweet shooting stroke who sets a Game 7 record with 50 points.
In the U.S., Steph Curry’s explosion is big news. But the next day in Paris, no one cares about Curry. Here, life goes on, ever moving forward.
