This Olympic tournament has more NBA players than ever before
The NBA presence at the Olympic basketball tournament has steadily grown through the years since the first NBA players showed up at the Barcelona Games back in 1992.
Back then, 18 NBA players from around the world made it to the prestigious event, good to make up 12.50 percent of the field.
Each Olympic tournament since then has had more NBA players in it than the one prior, with that number peaking this year it in Tokyo, where 34.72 percent of the participants in the basketball tournament being NBA players, for a total of 50 players from the top basketball league in the world taking part in the festivities.
While the average quality of the players is the highest it’s been at the event, it’s not a particularly star-studded one this year. Only seven current NBA All-Stars are at the tournament in Tokyo this summer, which is the second-worst number since 1992, tied with the 2000 Olympic Games and just ahead of the lowest number ever, which came in the 2004 Olympics that had just three All-Star participants.
Below, check out the number of NBA players that took part in each Olympic tournament, as well as the number of NBA All-Stars in each event.
Note: For this exercise, we considered NBA players the guys who played in the NBA during the season leading up to the Olympic tournament.