Zaccharie Risacher: ‘Back in France I was super athletic, and now I’m just a regular dude’

Atlanta Hawks rookie Zaccharie Risacher was selected with the top pick in the 2024 NBA Draft after he spent the 2023-24 season playing for JL Bourg-en-Bresse, a team in France’s LNB Elite league. Across 32 games played in the league a season ago, he averaged 10.1 points, 3.8 rebounds, 0.9 assists and 0.8 steals per game.

During Risacher’s time overseas, he put together plenty of highlight plays thanks to his impressive athleticism, including a poster alley-oop slam.

However, Risacher implied before the start of his first NBA season that his athleticism won’t separate him from the pack in what is widely regarded to be the best basketball league in the world.

“Back in France I was super athletic, and now I’m just a regular dude,” Risacher told The Athletic’s John Hollinger.

There’s no denying that the NBA is chock-full of incredibly gifted athletes. It’s a common occurrence in the league for players to sky in the air for some spectacular plays, whether that be a monster dunk or loud block.

Players like Ja Morant and Zach LaVine seem to defy the laws of physics with the way they can hang in the air for long periods of time.

But some of the best players in the NBA aren’t considered to be all that athletic. Denver Nuggets big man Nikola Jokic is a plodding 6-foot-11 big man with a limited vertical, yet he’s a three-time MVP and nightly triple-double threat. Also, Golden State Warriors star guard Stephen Curry isn’t prone to wowing people with his athleticism either, but he’s one of the greatest shooters the game has ever seen and a four-time champion.

Through four regular-season games, Risacher seems to still be very much a work in progress as a player. He is averaging 7.3 points on 30.3 percent shooting from the field and 21.4 percent from 3-point range coupled with 2.5 rebounds and 1.0 assist per game with the Hawks.

Hopefully, he will play more like a No. 1 overall pick in Atlanta’s next game on its schedule, which is against the Washington Wizards on Wednesday night. He has reached double digits in scoring just once since the beginning of the new campaign.