People in Canada will be watching, partly because of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. He is the NBA's best scorer and is likely to be named MVP, and he plays for Oklahoma City. This certainly helps attract Canadian fans.

Basketball fans around the world will be watching their favorite players. People in Serbia and Greece will support Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Fans in Turkey will watch Alperen Sengun play late at night. In Slovenia, people will get up early to see Luka Doncic play. Cameroon fans will watch Pascal Siakam. And Boston, the champions, have Kristaps Porzingis from Latvia and Al Horford from the Dominican Republic.

Again, the NBA playoffs will likely show how good international players are.

This season was special because the five best players in five different statistics were from five different countries - the first time this has happened in the NBA. For example, Gilgeous-Alexander is from Canada, Domantas Sabonis is from Lithuania, Victor Wembanyama is from France, Dyson Daniels is from Australia, and Trae Young is from the U.S. The playoffs will also have many international players. Gilgeous-Alexander will play in the playoffs, and Sabonis and Daniels might join him if their teams win in the play-in tournament.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver recently stated, "A very large percentage of our players are from other countries."

By the end of the season, players from 44 different countries had scored points in the NBA. For the first time in NBA history, players from a country other than the U.S. scored over 15,000 points together. Canadian players scored 15,588 points this season, and Gilgeous-Alexander, who was the first scoring champion from Canada, was the top scorer.

Many people think Gilgeous-Alexander will be the MVP this season. It will probably be him or Jokic. This means that for the seventh year in a row, an international player will be the MVP in the NBA. Antetokounmpo won twice, and then Jokic won three times in the next four seasons. Joel Embiid, who is from Cameroon and plays for the Philadelphia 76ers, won two seasons ago.

"Shai is the type of player you cannot stop," Toronto coach Darko Rajakovic said after a game between the Raptors and Thunder this season.

This means he's like many other international players today. No one can really stop players like Jokic, Antetokounmpo, and Doncic either.

And this season, Doncic was the first international player to have the most popular jersey in the NBA. This means NBAStore.com sold more of his jerseys than anyone else's. This happened partly because he changed teams during the season, but it is still important.

The Slovenian player is the first international player whose jersey was the most popular. He is also the first player besides Stephen Curry or LeBron James to have the most popular jersey in over ten years. Carmelo Anthony was the last player to do this when he was in New York in 2012-13.

"We are a small country with only 2 million people, but our sports achievements are incredible," said Ajsa Sivka, another Slovenian athlete. She said this on Monday night after being chosen by the Chicago Sky basketball team and asked about Luka Doncic and other famous Slovenian sports stars. "In every sport, we have at least one excellent athlete. I am very proud to be Slovenian."

This is happening at a time when the NBA is more serious than before about growing its presence around the world. Last month, FIBA, which is the international organization for basketball, and the NBA announced they would work together on a new European basketball league. This league has been planned for many years. The first goal is to have 16 teams, and it could include many of the biggest teams in Europe, like Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, and Manchester City.

This season, four players scored over 2,000 points in the NBA, and three of them were from other countries: Gilgeous-Alexander, Jokic, and Antetokounmpo. Worldwide, the amount of time people spent watching NBA League Pass increased by 6% compared to last season. In France, more people watched NBA games this season than ever before, even though Wembanyama didn't play in the last two months. This season, views of NBA-related social media in Canada reached new highs, and league data shows that more fans than ever before were watching in the Asia-Pacific region, which is already a popular area for basketball.

The head of FIBA, Andreas Zagklis, said that the growing number of people playing basketball around the world shows the sport is doing very well right now.

Around the world, and especially in North America, the NBA is now more popular and makes more money than ever before, Zagklis said.