awhom has forgotten more about international basketball than I will ever know, but to echo his re-enforcement of my earlier comment, here is a bit of a story.
I am pretty good friends with a guy named Jeremiah Boswell. Jeremiah played at Columbia, where he was a solid player but never a star. He averaged close to 30 minutes per game from his soph-senior years and scored 9.6 ppg as a senior. Nothing too special, especially at an Ivy league school, not a big-time program.
After graduating, Boswell decided to try to make a go of it playing professionally overseas. He did pretty well for himself, landing jobs in Brazil, Bulgaria, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Macedonia over the course of 6-7 years. I've never asked him what he made, but judging by the fact that he gave it up and the way he lives now, there's just no way he was clearing hundreds of thousands a year.
A couple years ago he gave up on it and decided to become a coach -- not of teams but to help really talented guys with individual skills. The Hawks hired him to work with their players and he does a lot of work with international players to hone their game so they will have a chance to compete in the NBA. He's been working with a ton of Chinese players lately. The cool thing is that he does all his workouts at my sons' high school, where he is working in the athletic department, so I sometimes wander into the gym and see him schooling some stud pro. For example, here is a pic of Boswell working last summer with James Harden:
And, just for fun, here's a pic of him with Coach K:
Anyway, my point here is that while playing overseas for a few years can be nice, it won't set you up for life unless you are among the top players in the top leagues. Trajan Langdon, who made millions playing for CSKA Moscow, was the exception, not the rule.
--Jason "I bet there are less than 20 Americans making more than a million a year playing international basketball" Evans