Countries With the Most NBA Players

The Raptors usually don't have an excessive amount of Canadians compared to others. Right now they have 3. An argument could be made that having a team helps promote interest in basketball but the Toronto Metro has 6 Million people and the Basketball Interest is kind of skyrocketing right now as Hockey falls out of fashion.

Before Nash, there were only really a couple of players of Note and Nash did not even go to a top College. Now it is very common to see Canadians at schools like Duke, Kentucky, or North Carolina. The majority of NBA Canadians were born in the late 90s.

Because basketball is not so popular in Netherlands.

Football holds a lot more importance there. Even baseball and volleyball are bigger, although who knows how that might change.

Yugoslavia was not in the Soviet sphere of influence since the The Tito–Stalin Split in 1948.

Jeremy Hunt is that you?

They were less close, but still obviously within the Soviet sphere much more than they were in the American sphere, with closer cultural, diplomatic, and economic ties to Russia than to the US and NATO, at the very least compared to other nearby countries like Italy and Greece, a dynamic that persisted in Serbia even if not in some Yugoslav successor states, and lasts to this day.

Sun Yue? I think he played in the NBA for a year or two

What? Is this a joke?

It's not so simple, in either direction. Yugoslavia was 3 times world champion, but US didn't send the best players and Dream Team went to the Olympics too late for a direct comparison. There are only 5 players in the field in any case. But Yugoslavia was on the rise, also with knowledge and experience from the US, and the best generation started developing just before the breakup. Plus they'd have a lot more NBA experience these days.

US team was beating Yugoslavia at the Olympics in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in the 1996 final match (that was after the breakup of Yugoslavia, so the team consisted only of Serbian and Montenegrin players. 14 minutes before the end of the game, the result was 51-50. That's when Divac got fouled out, and with Euroleague MVP Savic already injured, Yugoslavia had no more players at the center position, so the game ended 95-69). Anyway, you really can't compare today's basketball and the sport from 50 years ago. On the other hand, in the last 20 years Serbia alone won twice in the five matches against All-Star players filled US teams (once in an elimination game), and once had a last second shot to tie the game. This year, former Yugoslavia had two first team All-NBA players in Jokic and Doncic, along with another All Star in Vucevic. All in all, I am pretty sure US Team wouldn't have an easy job in those games, to say the least. Unfortunately, we'll never know.