The NBA is heading to Paris in 2025 as the league announced Monday that the San Antonio Spurs and Indiana Pacers will face off for two games next season. It will be a homecoming for Spurs rookie Victor Wembanyama, who will no doubt draw massive amounts of attention in his home country.
The games will take place on Jan. 23 and 25 next season, and it will be the third consecutive season the NBA will play a regular-season game in Paris. This past season, the Brooklyn Nets and Cleveland Cavaliers played a regular-season game in January, and in the season prior to that, the Chicago Bulls and Detroit Pistons made the trip across the pond.
But these two games between the Spurs and Pacers are of far greater significance than those two matchups with Wembanyama as the main focus. The No. 1 pick in the 2023 NBA Draft is an icon in his home country, so these two games next season will be huge attention grabbers for those in Paris.
Before he joined the NBA, Wembanyama starred for Metropolitans 92 of the LNB Pro A, which is the top tier of France's pro league.
This summer should also serve as a warm-up because Wembanyama, along with fellow NBA stars Rudy Gobert, Nicolas Batum, Bilal Coulibaly, and Evan Fournier, are expected to headline the French national team at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
With the Spurs heading back to Paris, it will mark the third and fourth games they've played there, the last time being a preseason game in 2006. That was when Hall of Famer Tony Parker, also a heralded French player, was starring for the Spurs, so it's obvious that the ties between the Spurs and France run deep.
While the Spurs will get most of the fanfare on this trip, the Pacers are the better team. This will be Indiana's first time playing in France and the first time since 2019 that they've participated in an NBA Global Games event. The last time was for a regular-season game in 2019 against the Sacramento Kings in Mumbai, India.
These matchups between Wembanyama and Tyrese Haliburton will surely be entertaining. While it may seem like the Pacers will roll over the Spurs, given how both teams did this season, San Antonio started to improve significantly towards the end of the season. With both of these games being in Paris, that also means that it will be the only time during the regular season that these two teams will face each other, taking away a home game for both sides.
