The court at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, is usually filled with the sound of squeaking trainers and the rapid-fire thud of leather against hardwood. But in the spring of 2015, every eye in the gym was drawn to a young man who looked as though he had been carved straight out of the earth.
Standing seven-foot-two, with shoulders like mountain ridges and hands that swallowed a basketball whole, nineteen-year-old Satnam Singh Bhamara looked down at his shoes. They were size 20, shipped specially from the United States because no shop in his native India manufactured footwear anywhere near big enough for his feet.
Four thousand miles away, in a tiny village called Ballo Ke in the heart of Punjab, his father, Balbir, sat by a crackling radio. Balbir was a wheat farmer who stood seven-foot tall himself, a local legend whose height was seen as a strange quirk of nature rather than an athletic golden ticket. In Ballo Ke, towering over the crops meant hard manual labour and cracked doorframes. It certainly didn’t mean making it in the NBA.
Yet, on 25 June 2015, history shifted on its axis.
Inside the Barclays Centre in Brooklyn, New York, Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum stepped up to the podium during the second round of the NBA Draft.
“With the 52nd pick in the 2015 NBA Draft, the Dallas Mavericks select… Satnam Singh Bhamara, from Punjab, India.”
In that single sentence, Satnam became the first Indian-born player ever selected by an NBA franchise. He wasn’t just a prospect anymore; he was a catalyst for a nation of 1.3 billion people that had long viewed basketball as a mere footnote to cricket.
Satnam’s journey to that podium had been anything but straightforward. At nine years old, he was already well over six feet tall. Local coaches nudged his father to send him to the Ludhiana Basketball Academy—a modest facility in Punjab that would somehow become the cradle of Indian basketball. There, under the watchful eye of visionary coach Dr Sankaran Subramanian, Satnam learnt how to move his giant frame, converting sheer size into a soft touch around the basket. By fourteen, he was on a flight to America, knowing virtually no English, equipped only with a ferocious work ethic and the immense pressure of a nation’s hopes resting on his shoulders.
While Satnam’s draft night made international headlines, another giant was forging a parallel path just two months earlier on the West Coast.
His name was Sim Bhullar.
Born in Ontario, Canada, to Punjabi immigrants who had moved abroad to build a new life, Sim stood a staggering seven-foot-five and weighed over 25 stone. Raised on a steady diet of Canadian winters and Punjabi family values, Sim had dominated the university circuit at New Mexico State, using his unmatchable size to wall off the key and swat away shots with ease.
Undrafted in 2014, Sim spent months grinding in the NBA’s developmental league, patiently waiting for an opening. That break came in April 2015, when the Sacramento Kings—owned by Indian-American businessman Vivek Ranadivé—signed him to a 10-day contract.
On 7 April 2015, against the Minnesota Timberwolves, the buzzer sounded at the scorer’s table with 16.1 seconds remaining on the clock.
Sim checked into the game.
It was a brief appearance—barely a quarter of a minute—but when his boots touched the hardwood, Sim Bhullar officially became the first player of Indian descent to play in an official NBA regular-season game. Two nights later, against the Utah Jazz, he caught a soft drop-off pass near the rim, turned, and dropped in a smooth hook shot over two defenders for his first NBA points.
For the South Asian diaspora watching right across the globe, it was an electric moment. The barrier hadn’t just been breached; it had been thoroughly shattered.
Neither Satnam nor Sim went on to enjoy long, hall-of-fame careers in the NBA. The league was rapidly evolving into a fast-paced, three-point-heavy environment that punished traditional, ultra-heavy centres. Satnam spent his North American career developing with the Texas Legends in the G League, before eventually bringing his colossal presence and charismatic personality to a new stage: professional wrestling with All Elite Wrestling (AEW). Meanwhile, Sim found tremendous success abroad, becoming a dominant, award-winning star in Asian leagues across Taiwan and China.
Yet, measuring their impact purely by NBA stat sheets misses the point entirely.
Before Satnam and Sim, an Indian player setting foot on an NBA court was viewed as a total impossibility—a statistical anomaly that the sporting world simply wasn’t built for. They proved that talent from the dusty courts of Punjab or the immigrant hubs of Canada could command the attention of the top basketball league on Earth.
Their footsteps paved a highway for those who followed. Just a few years later, Princepal Singh—another tall, mobile forward from Punjab who walked the same Ludhiana Academy floors as Satnam—signed with the elite NBA G League Ignite program and earned an NBA Summer League championship ring with the Sacramento Kings in 2021.
Today, youth basketball courts across Mumbai, Delhi, and Chandigarh are crowded with kids rocking high-top trainers, practising crossover dribbles, and looking up at the hoop. They no longer wonder if an Indian player can reach the absolute pinnacle of the game. They already know the answer—because two giants named Satnam and Sim walked there first.
Heartland players trade virtual coins for real stakes.
How slot studios localise games for India.
Crypto stocks gain as AI money rotates.
East Zone's leadership test for young wonderkid.