Joakim Noah’s NOMAD journey has taken him to Puerto Rico, where the former NBA Defensive Player of the Year explores one of the island’s most historic basketball institutions: the Cangrejeros de Santurce.
The franchise has existed in different forms for decades and owns eight BSN championships, but it had disappeared from Puerto Rico’s top professional league after the 2016 season. That changed in 2021, when a new ownership group led by music executive Noah Assad brought Santurce back to the Baloncesto Superior Nacional. Bad Bunny and Jonathan Miranda subsequently joined the ownership group, giving the returning franchise an enormous cultural profile.
Bad Bunny’s involvement was about more than attaching a celebrity name to a basketball team. The new ownership group presented the project as an attempt to reconnect Santurce with its community through basketball, music and culture. The club also brought former NBA champion and Puerto Rican icon J.J. Barea back to Santurce for its comeback season.
That revival became part of a much larger boom for Puerto Rican basketball. BSN attendance more than doubled from roughly 480,000 tickets sold in 2018 to nearly one million in 2023, while celebrity ownership and increased visibility helped turn league games into major entertainment events. Bad Bunny’s arrival in Santurce was widely viewed as one of the catalysts for that renewed attention.
Noah’s connection to Puerto Rico also predates this latest visit. After retiring from the NBA, he became involved in projects designed to restore outdoor basketball courts and combine them with work from local artists. In 2023, one of those efforts revitalized a court in Santurce as part of the “Hennessy In the Paint” initiative.
That makes Santurce a natural subject for NOMAD. Noah is not simply visiting another professional team; he is examining how basketball can become intertwined with the identity of a neighborhood.
