Nicolas Batum retired from the NBA on Monday after 18 seasons, and the message that’s actually resonating isn’t the one for the team he just left. It’s the one for the team that traded him away in 2015, and it might be the classiest exit an athlete has posted all year.
Batum posted a video with his 10-year-old son, Ayden, then followed it with individual thank-you messages to every franchise that ever rostered him: Portland, Charlotte, a brief run in Philly, and the Clippers, where he actually spent his final six seasons before the team declined his option this summer. As ESPN detailed, Nicolas Batum’s retirement caps a career of 9.6 points, 4.7 rebounds and 3.0 assists a game across 18 seasons in the NBA, a 37.1 percent clip from three, and 76 playoff appearances. Those aren’t Hall of Fame numbers. Those are glue-guy numbers, the kind that usually get you a group text from teammates and nothing else once you’re gone.
The Portland message is the one that actually blew up. His farewell included this, word for word: “I can’t put into words how I feel about this franchise and this city. Portland was my introduction to this league and this country. I couldn’t have asked for a better franchise to start my career with.” He wrote that about a team he hasn’t played for since 2015.
Here’s where it gets weird if you actually sit with it. Batum was never Portland’s best player, never really the second-best player, and definitely not the guy the Trail Blazers crowd was chanting for. He was a 19-year-old the franchise drafted out of France in 2008 and turned into a rotation piece on rosters that spent years rebuilding around LaMarcus Aldridge and, eventually, Damian Lillard. In seven seasons there, he played 481 games, started 428 of them, and averaged 11.2 points a night for teams that were never really his to lead.
That’s the kind of résumé that gets forgotten the moment the roster turns over.
He clearly wasn’t going to let that happen, so he posted the farewells one team at a time:
https://twitter.com/nicolas88batum/status/2102149236053741572
The Clippers got a shorter message, posted that same night: “All LOVE Clippers Nation Thank you for those 6 years.” And to be fair to the timeline, the Clippers had just declined his option two months earlier, so this isn’t some clean, everybody-agreed-it-was-time farewell tour. He got let go and still wrote a paragraph to every team that ever paid him, with zero bitterness in any of it.
The Trail Blazers organization wrote back almost immediately, per Blazer’s Edge, calling him a “Blazers legend in every sense of the word.” That’s an insane thing to say about a career 11-point scorer. It’s also not wrong.
He kept the thread going, team by team, in the minutes after:
https://twitter.com/nicolas88batum/status/2102148715460833712
I play in a rec league on Tuesday nights and I’m not good, so I have no business comparing myself to an 18-year NBA career. But I get the instinct. Most guys who get traded, or cut, or non-tendered, don’t bother thanking the franchise that gave them the first shot.
They let the next chapter overwrite it and move on instead. Batum’s farewell to Portland did the opposite. Eighteen years and four teams later, the one that got the most words was the one that let him go first.
You don’t stage that kind of goodbye for engagement. You write it because eleven years later, it still feels true.
