In a country of 1.8 million people, two professions guarantee you will never have to introduce yourself: opera singer and basketball player. Latvia has been very good at both for a very long time. The most famous Latvian basketball player of the modern era was born in Liepāja on 2 August 1995, weighed about four kilograms at birth, grew to seven feet three inches, was drafted fourth overall by the New York Knicks in 2015, and won the NBA Championship with the Boston Celtics in June 2024. His name is Kristaps Porziņģis. There is no Latvian under the age of forty who could not tell you that, including Latvians who have never watched a basketball game.

Short answer, before the long version

Liepāja: the city he came from

Liepāja is Latvia’s third-largest city after Riga and Daugavpils, sits on the Baltic coast in southern Kurzeme, has about 65,000 people, and is known to non-Latvians, when it is known at all, for three things: a long sandy beach that is empty most of the year, an unusually good music scene that has produced a remarkable number of national rock bands, and Kristaps Porziņģis. The first two are why Latvians like the city. The third is why anyone outside the country has heard of it.

The Porziņģis family is a basketball family in the strict sense: father played, mother played, all three brothers played. The eldest, Mārtiņš, was a youth and amateur player who went on to manage Kristaps’s career as his agent. The middle brother, Jānis, played professionally in Europe, briefly in the NBA Summer League, and then spent most of his career in the Latvian and Estonian top leagues. The youngest, Kristaps, was the one who kept growing.

The early Liepāja career was at BK Liepājas Lauvas — the Liepāja Lions — where he played in the youth system. By the time he was twelve he was already too tall for the local junior leagues. By thirteen he was being scouted internationally. The decision to send him to Spain at fifteen was the kind of decision that small-country basketball families make all the time and that no parent finds easy. The Spanish junior basketball system at that time was the strongest in Europe by a margin, and the family made the calculation that Latvian basketball, as good as it was, could not finish his development at the level he had a chance to reach. He moved to Sevilla in 2010.

The Liepāja connection is still alive. Porziņģis has invested in youth basketball in his home city, returns to spend time there in the off-season when he can, and is openly proud of being from Kurzeme rather than from the capital. There is also a separate Liepāja basketball thread to remember: the city was the home of BK Liepājas Lauvas’s long-running senior team and has produced several other professional players. But Porziņģis is the one whose name everyone in town knows.

The Sevilla years: a teenager in the ACB

Spanish professional basketball — the ACB league, formally the Liga ACB — is widely regarded as the second-strongest domestic competition in the world after the NBA. Cajasol Sevilla (later renamed Baloncesto Sevilla, after the bank dropped the sponsorship) was a mid-table ACB club through this period, the kind of team that was perpetually fighting to avoid relegation but that ran a serious youth academy. For a Latvian fifteen-year-old, the move was a step up in standard of practice that no Latvian club could have offered.

Porziņģis spent five years with Sevilla, from 2010 to 2015. He moved through the youth system, played in the second-division Spanish league as a teenager, debuted in the senior ACB squad, and gradually established himself as a long, mobile big man with a reliable jump shot — an unusual combination in a player his height. By his last ACB season he was averaging around eleven points and five rebounds in roughly twenty minutes a game and had been named to the Spanish league’s rising stars team.

What this looked like from Latvia was a teenager from a small Baltic country playing at a level that the country itself could not have provided, in a league that had produced multiple NBA players, and getting steadily better. By 2015 the question among Latvian basketball fans was no longer whether he would be drafted but where in the order.

The Knicks years: drafted, booed, then loved

The 2015 NBA Draft was held on 25 June 2015 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The Knicks held the fourth overall pick, having finished the 2014–15 season near the bottom of the league. Knicks fans had spent the run-up to the draft hoping for an established American college star, particularly Jahlil Okafor or D’Angelo Russell, both of whom went earlier than expected. When Adam Silver walked to the lectern and read “with the fourth pick in the 2015 NBA Draft, the New York Knicks select Kristaps Porziņģis from Latvia,” the Barclays Center booed loud enough to be embarrassing. There is a video.

The classic photograph from that night is of a young boy in a Knicks shirt at the Barclays Center, in the front row, openly crying as the pick was announced. The boy became a small national meme in the United States. He also turned out, two years later, to be a Porziņģis fan.

The reversal happened fast. Porziņģis arrived at preseason camp in autumn 2015 as a 20-year-old who was not visibly intimidated by anything. By Christmas he was averaging double figures. By the All-Star break he was the runaway favourite for Rookie of the Year (he eventually finished second in the voting). He could shoot threes, he could block shots, he could run the floor for a man his height in a way that very few players in the league could match. The Knicks fan-base, which had not had much to be excited about in the previous decade, picked him up and ran with him. The crying-boy meme migrated into shirts and jerseys. The Knicks called him “The Unicorn,” a nickname that mostly stuck.

The next two seasons were the high-water mark of his New York career. By his third year, 2017–18, he had made the NBA All-Star team for the first time and was averaging close to 23 points and seven rebounds a game. The trajectory was unmistakable.

Then, on 6 February 2018, in a home game against the Milwaukee Bucks, he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee on a dunk attempt, landing awkwardly. The injury cost him the rest of that season and the entirety of the next one. ACL recovery in a player that tall is medically harder than in a smaller player — the lever arms are longer, the loads on the joints are higher, and the rebuild of trust in the leg takes time. He did not play another NBA game for almost two years.

While he was rehabilitating, the front office relationship with the Knicks deteriorated. The details have never been publicly clarified to anyone’s satisfaction. By the trade deadline of January 2019 he was traded to the Dallas Mavericks in a multi-player deal. New York fans were unhappy about it; some still are.

Dallas, Washington, Boston, and a championship

The Dallas chapter (January 2019 to February 2022) was complicated. He returned to the floor in October 2019 after the long rehabilitation, played alongside Luka Dončić, the rookie-of-the-year Slovenian who was already the team’s offensive engine, and put up steady All-Star-adjacent numbers without quite returning to his pre-injury level. The fit with Dončić was sometimes uneasy. He played in Dallas’s 2020 first-round playoff series against the Los Angeles Clippers and again in 2021. By 2022 the relationship with the franchise had run its course, and at the trade deadline he was sent to the Washington Wizards in a deal that brought Spencer Dinwiddie and the Latvian shooter Dāvis Bertāns to Dallas.

The Washington chapter (February 2022 to June 2023) is, frankly, the easiest to summarise. He played well on a team that was not very good. He averaged in the low twenties for points, hit threes, blocked shots, and stayed mostly healthy. Wizards basketball during that stretch did not make many highlight reels. Latvians watched anyway, mostly on streams in the middle of the night, because it was Porziņģis. In June 2023 he was traded to the Boston Celtics in a complex three-team deal involving the Memphis Grizzlies and a number of draft picks.

The Boston chapter changed his career. The Celtics in 2023–24 were the most complete team in the NBA, anchored by Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, with the deepest supporting cast in the league. Porziņģis fit the system immediately: he stretched the floor with his shooting, anchored the defence at the rim, and let Tatum and Brown work the wings without needing to reset every possession. He had the best regular season of his career by efficiency. The Celtics finished the regular season with the league’s best record at 64–18.

The 2024 NBA Playoffs were a coronation. Porziņģis missed several games to a calf injury but returned for the Finals against the Dallas Mavericks — the team that had traded him away two years earlier — and contributed crucial minutes in a 4–1 series win. The Celtics won the championship on 17 June 2024 at TD Garden in Boston. Porziņģis lifted the Larry O’Brien trophy with a Latvian flag draped around his shoulders. The image went on the front page of every Latvian newspaper.

That moment was, in a literal sense, the highest competitive achievement by a Latvian athlete in the post-Soviet era. The country shut down for the night.

The 2023 FIBA World Cup, and why it mattered more than anyone abroad realised

If you had to pick one thing that explains why Porziņģis is to Latvians what he is — not just a famous athlete, but a national figure — it would not be the Boston championship. It would be what he did for the Latvian national team at the FIBA Basketball World Cup in 2023.

Latvia had qualified for the World Cup — held in Manila, Jakarta, and Okinawa — through the European qualifiers. The squad was led by Porziņģis, with the Bertāns brothers (Dāvis and Dairis), Rolands Šmits, and the long-serving point guard Jānis Strēlnieks, under the head coach Luca Banchi. Going into the tournament, Latvia were ranked in the high teens by FIBA. No Latvian basketball team had ever finished higher than seventh at a World Cup, in 2007.

What happened in Manila was the kind of run that small countries dream about and almost never get. Latvia beat Lebanon and Canada in the group stage. They lost to Spain. They moved into the second round, beat Brazil, beat Italy, lost to Lithuania. In the classification round they beat the United States — beat the United States — in an 11-point win that turned out, on closer inspection, not to have been a fluke at all. They lost the fifth-place game to Slovenia by ten. Final ranking: fifth in the world, the best in Latvian basketball history.

Porziņģis missed parts of the tournament with a calf strain and the Bertāns brothers carried more of the offensive load than anyone had expected, but the achievement was the team’s. Latvians watching in pubs and offices and family flats stayed up for every game. The radio play-by-play from Manila — the long broadcast tradition from when Latvian basketball ruled European competition in the 1930s — came back to life. People who had never watched basketball before tuned in.

For non-Latvian readers it is hard to convey what fifth place at a World Cup means to a country of 1.8 million. The closest analogy is what an Olympic medal means to Iceland, or what the 2018 World Cup quarterfinal meant to Croatia. It is not just a sporting result. It is a confirmation that the country is real, that it can produce world-class work in a serious competitive arena, that the small-country grind — long winters, thin domestic leagues, players moving abroad young — is not a permanent disadvantage. Porziņģis as the captain of that team was the visible figurehead of a much bigger argument.

My honest take

Foreign visitors to Latvia ask, sometimes, whether basketball is really as big a deal here as it seems. The answer is yes, and not in the slightly ironic way Americans love their college teams or Italians love their Serie A. Latvian basketball goes back to before the Second World War — the national team won the European Championship in 1935 — and it is the one team sport where the country has consistently competed at world level. The big domestic clubs (Vērmanes Basketbola Klubs in the inter-war period, ASK Riga in the Soviet era, Vēf Riga today) are part of national life in a way that football, for example, is not.

Porziņģis is not the only famous Latvian basketball player. Andris Biedriņš won an NBA championship with the Golden State Warriors in 2015. The Bertāns brothers (Dāvis and Dairis) have spent years in the NBA. Gundars Vētra was the first Latvian in the NBA, drafted by Minnesota in 1992. Jānis Krūmiņš, the seven-foot Soviet-era centre from Riga, won an Olympic silver medal in 1956. The line is long. Porziņģis is the one who came after the country was independent again, who chose Latvia rather than Russia for his national team, who carried the captain’s armband at the 2023 World Cup, and who lifted the Larry O’Brien trophy with a Latvian flag in 2024.

If you visit Liepāja, walk along the beach, eat at one of the small kitchens in the old town, listen to a band at one of the city’s clubs in summer, and ask any Latvian under fifty where Porziņģis is from. They will say Liepāja with the same satisfaction that an Englishman from Salford talks about being from Salford when someone asks about Manchester.

That is part of what makes Liepāja worth visiting. Not because of one tall man, exactly, but because the country is small enough that one tall man from one mid-sized port city can be a national figure. The scale of things in Latvia is human in a way that scale in larger countries cannot be. Porziņģis is one of the more visible expressions of that. The dainas of Krišjānis Barons are another. The country contains both, and both make sense in the same conversation.

Frequently asked questions about Kristaps Porziņģis

If you are interested in famous Latvians: the standalone profile of Krišjānis Barons, the man whose 217,996 cards underwrite the Latvian language, is here. The wider story of how a country of 1.8 million has produced both Barons and Porziņģis is in A Brief History of Latvia.

Liepāja is a four-hour drive west of Riga and is not on most short-trip itineraries. We can arrange a Liepāja day if you are interested — ask us when you book one of our guided Rundāle Palace excursions, since the route west passes through Bauska. Or stand in the right Riga pub during a Latvia national team game and you will get the answer to most of the questions above without anyone needing to explain.