This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

OK, so we've brought this up before, but the Jazz now have gone second level.

They're freaking global, the United Nations of NBA basketball.

They are Salt Lake International.

If all the players on this team spoke their native tongue, or the language of their parents, in the locker room, nobody could understand anybody. It would be the Tower of Babel. What they would have here is a failure to communicate. If they took something basic, something along the lines of saying — oh, I dunno — hello, it would go something like this:

Rudy Gobert and Boris Diaw: Bonjour.

Jonas Jerebko: Halla.

Ekpe Udoh: Koyo. Mesiere. Sannu. Abole. Mavo. (Depending on where you are in Nigeria)

Raul Neto: Ola.

Thabo Sefolosha: Bonjour. Ciao. Wie geht's?

Ricky Rubio: Hola.

Joe Ingles and Dante Exum: G'day, mate.

In the case of Diaw, it might be more apropos to say: Au revoir. He might soon be moved.

Either way, the Jazz quite literally have taken a wide view of the modern game. They've proved again and again, as recently as the last 24 hours, that they are a land, a team, of opportunity for people from anywhere. Looking at their roster is like jumping aboard a boat in Disney's It's a Small World.

If you approximated the mileage it would take to visit these guys' relatives in their homelands, round trip, it would run something like this:

Gobert and Diaw (France): 10,126 miles, each.

Jerebko (Sweden): 9,906.

Udoh (Nigeria): 14,652.

Neto (Brazil): 10,780.

Sefolosha (Switzerland): 10,706.

Rubio (Spain): 10,474.

Ingles and Exum: 17,042, each.

That's a grand total of 110,854 miles, which is halfway to the moon.

There are not presently any plans for lunar signings.

The Jazz, then, are the NBA's version of the Globetrotters.

The latest additions to the team have poured in over the past day:

Sefolosha, who most recently was with the Atlanta Hawks, Jerebko, who was with the Boston Celtics, and Udoh, who was with Fenerbahce, a team, if you're not up on your Turkish basketball, that is located in Istanbul. Udoh is a former No. 6 draft pick of the Golden State Warriors who didn't pan out in the NBA, so he rebuilt himself with an outfit that just won the Euroleague title in May. His full name is Ekpedeme Friday Udoh. To be precise, his parents are from Nigeria. He actually was born in Edmond, Okla. So maybe in the locker room greetings, his would go like this …

Udoh: Howdy, y'all.

Karl Malone, all the way from Louisiana (3,114 miles), predicted it would shape up like this with the Jazz. After he played his last season in Utah, during a radio interview, while eating a bowser bowl of salad, with greens rolling around inside the Mailman's mouth, he said:

"You wait, the Jazz roster will be full of foreign players."

He was right back then. And he's even more right now.

His reasoning, beyond anything unique in the culture here and the players more readily adapting to it, centered on attitude and style of play: "They can pass and shoot. Too many [young] Americans get caught up in the dribbling behind the back and between the legs. The foreign guys know the fundamentals."

Maybe it's just because the foreign guys can flat play the game.

Whatever the reason, the longstanding, unfair, antiquated characterizations of international players — they're soft, they don't have a good feel for the game, they smoke three packs of Camels a day — no longer apply, if they ever did, which they likely didn't.

The NBA had a record 113 international players from 41 different countries on opening night this past season. All 30 teams had at least one foreign player. The Jazz led the league with seven.

Now, with these latest moves, they have eight, and that's not counting Udoh.

The Jazz clearly don't see borders or boundaries here, don't see basketball as an American game, nor should they. They're just as likely to sign a player from Dusseldorf as they are from Detroit, from Buenos Aires as the Bronx. One Jazz executive told me a year or so ago the team would look at every corner of the world to find a player. They would make like Magellan. And so they have.

Communication always has been a big deal to coach Quin Snyder. He insists on it when his players are on the floor, particularly at the defensive end. Fortunately, all of these guys speak English, some of them speak it better than my friends from South Philly. It's just that, for a lot of them, it may not be the first language that enters their heads or comes out of their mouths.

No big deal.

The world-wide flavor is compelling and cool. There's no reason not to embrace it, to celebrate it, especially if these guys really can contribute. But if they look slightly distracted or somehow less than devout during the playing of the national anthem before games, don't hold it against them. America is the country that enables them to make millions of millions of dollars, but it is not, for more than half the team, the land of their fathers.

GORDON MONSON hosts "The Big Show" with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone. Twitter: @GordonMonson.