ATLANTA — There is a basketball court in the backyard of a home in Lyon, France. Green plastic tiles form the flooring. The space is surrounded by trees.

“It is the best court of the world,” said Stéphane Risacher, who has supervised this Gallic corner of hoopdom for the better part of the past 20 years.

This humble court matters much more now in Atlanta — and the entirety of the basketball world — than it did at the beginning of this week. It is where Zaccharie Risacher first learned to play, starting a journey that has reached a plateau that no one could have predicted on that court in Lyon or elsewhere — on Wednesday, he became the first overall pick in the NBA draft. Stéphane introduced this basketball greenhouse to Atlanta on Friday, when his son was presented to local media at the Hawks training complex.

“This is where a lot of things happened,” Stéphane said, showing media members a photo of the court on his phone.

How the next legs of Risacher’s basketball career will play out is a mystery. He is the first pick of a draft that has been seen as unusually bereft of impactful talent. As such, not many are ticketing Risacher — a 6-foot-9 wing player whose strengths are his defensive versatility and his 3-point shooting — for stardom, unlike last year’s top pick, fellow Frenchman Victor Wembanyama. Risacher also joins a team whose track record for picking winners in the draft is modest.

But Risacher’s rise from the third largest city in France, known more for its otherworldly cuisine than its propensity for generating NBA talent, is worth appreciating all the same. One doesn’t reach this point by accident. And it’s not every day that first overall picks in any sport come Atlanta’s way, and then even more infrequently on a path that started with such an unlikely starting point.

Said Risacher, “This is crazy.”

The 19-year-old Frenchman did have one significant advantage in his basketball rearing. His father played professionally in France and is a member of the French basketball hall of fame. He played on the 2000 Olympic team that won a silver medal and, in fact, was on the floor when Vince Carter unleashed one of the more spectacular and merciless dunks ever perpetrated, the famed “Dunk of Death” over Frédéric Weis.

“I remember that it was one of the most incredible moments of sports history,” Stéphane said. “Nobody was expecting it. That’s pretty much it.”

Risacher and his younger sister, Ainhoa, grew up in a family where basketball was part of life. Stéphane said he liked for his children to play sports “because it’s a very good way to teach them about life.”

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