Language of basketball: How international NBA players think about the game - ESPN

GIANNIS ANTETOKOUNMPO COULDN'T stay quiet and confused. His coach wouldn't allow it.

Early in Antetokounmpo's NBA career, he was still learning English and often felt intimidated by how fast the words flew out of the mouths of his Milwaukee Bucks coaches and teammates. Antetokounmpo especially struggled with slang and basketball terminology after spending the first 18 years of his life in Greece.

O.J. Mayo, the 2008 No. 3 pick playing for Milwaukee at the time, gave Antetokounmpo several movies such as «Friday» and «Friday After Next» to help him pick up on some of the common vernacular used by the players. But that didn't help when then-Bucks coach Jason Kidd called on Antetokounmpo in film sessions.

«I was like, 'Coach, I don't understand what you're saying,» Antetokounmpo recalled recently to ESPN. «He kept saying, 'Stop using that you don't understand what I'm saying as an excuse.'»

Kidd and his coaching staff printed out a sheet filled with basketball terminology and gave it to Antetokounmpo to study. They scheduled frequent sessions in which a coach would blurt out a term from the sheet and order Antetokounmpo to demonstrate what it meant.

«I thought it would be easier for us to teach him English than him teach us Greek, even though we might have learned a couple of words,» Kidd joked a dozen years later. «It worked out pretty well.»

Antetokounmpo, a two-time MVP and 10-time All-Star, is one of many NBA players whose native language is not English. It has become an international league, featuring 135 players from 43 countries other than America to start the season, according to the league, so much so that the new NBA All-Star Game format features one international and two American squads.

Some of those players