LOS ANGELES \u2014 Versatile forward Nicolas Batum is retiring following an 18-year NBA career and a long stint with the French national team.<\/p>\n
\u201cI decided to retire from basketball for several reasons,\u201d Batum told his 10-year-old son, Ayden, in the video. \u201cI want to come home and be with you. I\u2019m going to take care of you and make room for others. I think I\u2019ve done my time. My time with France ended two years ago. And the NBA is over too. You know, when you\u2019ve played as much basketball as I have, at some point, you have to know when to stop. … I\u2019ve done everything I needed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Batum played two seasons in the French league before being selected in the first round of the NBA draft by the Portland Trail Blazers. The 6-foot-7 forward spent seven seasons in Portland before playing the next six with Charlotte.<\/p>\n
Batum spent most of his final six seasons with the Los Angeles Clippers, with a short stint in Philadelphia in 2023-24. He was also a stalwart on French national teams that won silver medals in the 2020 and 2024 Olympics.<\/p>\n
Batum averaged 9.6 points, 4.7 rebounds and 3.0 assists while shooting 37% from three-point range during his NBA career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES \u2014 Versatile forward Nicolas Batum is retiring following an 18-year NBA career and a long stint…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":904609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-904608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/904609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}