Nicolas Batum Calls It a Career After 18 NBA Seasons

The 37-year-old French forward announced his decision Monday in an Instagram video filmed at the gym where he first played as a child.

Nicolas Batum has retired from the NBA after 18 seasons. The 37-year-old French forward shared the news on Monday, Sept. 21, through a video posted on Instagram that ran close to 10 minutes. In it, he returned to Gym Even in Pont-l'Évêque, France, the facility where, by his own account, he first took up the game on Sept. 21, 1991, at age two and a half. This visit was different: he brought along his son, Ayden.

Toward the end of the video, Batum asked Ayden whether he wanted him to keep playing. When the boy said yes, his father answered no and declared it finished. Batum later explained that after roughly 25 years devoted to the sport, he no longer wanted to miss out on family life and felt it was time to step away.

Batum entered the league with the Portland Trail Blazers and was a key rotation piece on teams that qualified for the postseason six times across his seven seasons there. A 2015 trade sent him to the Charlotte Hornets for five years, and he joined the Los Angeles Clippers on a minimum contract in December 2020.

Early in the 2023-24 season, Batum was moved to the Philadelphia 76ers in the deal that brought James Harden to Los Angeles, then came back to the Clippers the following summer on a two-year contract worth $9.6 million. During that stretch he converted 40.3% of his three-point attempts while playing alongside Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and Harden. He was also on the 2020-21 Clippers team that reached the Western Conference Finals for the only time in franchise history.

Internationally, Batum captained the French national team at the 2024 Paris Olympics, a run documented in the Netflix film "Court of Gold," in which his halftime speeches and mentorship of Victor Wembanyama featured prominently.