7,277 miles.

Depending on your profession, and potentially your lifestyle, that metric can be perceived in a multitude of different ways.

7,277 miles on the odometer of the sedan you’re interested in? Still basically brand new, and it will help you get a decent discount.

7,277 miles on an airplane? That’s a little longer than a round trip from John F. Kennedy in New York to London Heathrow.

In February 2025, 7,277 miles was the distance the Portland Trail Blazers’ emerging forward Sidy Cissoko’s NBA career traveled—some physically and some in spirit—in a whirlwind of transactions that left the then-20-year-old Frenchman’s NBA future stuck in purgatory.

Across a span of just five days, the 6-foot-6 shooting guard would be associated with four different franchises, and left wondering where his basketball career would take him next.

Landing in Portland on a two-way contract, there was still an indecisive glisten in Cissoko’s eyes when he met the media for the first time.

Was this a city he could call home or just another short-term pit stop on a one-way ticket out of the league?

Yet, nearly two years later, in the arena of the same organization that didn’t even want to spend 48 hours with him, Cissoko helped engineer an NBA Cup win as a starter of the surging 9-3 Blazers.

RipSidy, a nickname that was written in the stars, truly resembles everything about the Blazers organization, the people of Portland and the whole state of Oregon. He has kept his nose to the ground, worked his tail off and continuously raises himself up off the canvas when life knocks him down.

The Boy From France

It is almost an accepted fate that a player’s NBA career could be over in an instant. All the travel, sacrifice and grind can be thrown on the back burner if someone sitting at a desk in an NBA front office says so.

Few know sacrifice like Cissoko. He also knows what it takes to make it into professional basketball, being dedicated and driven to the sport.

“If I can die on the court, I will die on the court,” Cissoko told Conor Bergin of Blazers Edge and other reporters after a game in December 2025.

It was a mentality instilled in him by his role model, his dad. Yaya Cissoko was a member of the 1980 Senegalese Olympic basketball team, participating in the Games in Moscow. Yaya wouldn't become a father to his son, Sidy, for another 24 years after the games, on April 2, 2004.

From an early age, Sidy wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and perhaps exceed some of his accomplishments along the way. His father went undrafted in the 1979 NBA Draft and only played professional basketball in France briefly.

Sidy never saw his father play live but took all his advice and lessons as gospel along his own journey through the French youth basketball ranks.

“You know when you tell something to a kid, it just [sticks in their] brain?“ Cissoko told Bergin.

It didn't take long for the Cissoko basketball genetics to kick in as Sidy was beginning to become a big fish in a small pond, dominating the competition in his region of France.

At the age of 13, he moved from Saint-Maurice, an extension of the Paris suburbs, to Vitoria-Gasteiz, a mid-sized city in Spain, to play youth basketball for Baskonia.

Being in the new environment of Spanish club basketball allowed Cissoko to hone his skills and develop his all-around game, playing for his national team at different youth levels before ultimately earning him a spot on Team World for the 2022 Nike Hoop Summit, hosted (in elite foreshadowing fashion) at Moda Center in Portland, Oregon.

From there, the benchmarks just kept coming. After his performance for Team World, Cissoko was recruited to join the G League Ignite program, becoming teammates with standout guard Scoot Henderson (more foreshadowing) and becoming the first European prospect to sign with the program.

After one season with Ignite, it was time for another benchmark to be set, this time by declaring for the 2023 NBA Draft, where he was selected 44th overall by the San Antonio Spurs, an organization that took another Frenchman with the first overall pick by the name of Victor Wembanyama.

There was a rare stall in Cissoko’s adaptation to the NBA level. Spending time in his rookie season dealing with an ankle injury—that later needed surgery —and struggling with the acclimation to the best basketball league in the world. As a result, Cissoko began to struggle with his mental health.

"When I was injured, I fell a bit into depression. It was difficult," Cissoko told Hoopsidia in a 2024 sit down interview (translated from French to English).

The hard transition to the NBA spares no one, as Sidy spent the majority of his early days in the G League with the Austin Spurs, playing in only 29 regular-season games across one and a half seasons for his parent club.

Then, on February 3, 2025, just one year and eight months after surpassing his father's dream and being drafted into the NBA, the circus of moves began for Cissoko, taking him on an emotional roller coaster across the country.

The Longest Week of His Career

Shams Charania was coming off an all-time NBA trade announcement. Just under 24 hours earlier, he had broken the trade of all trades when Nico Harrison and the Dallas Mavericks sent Slovenian superstar Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers.

While the seismic plates of the basketball world were still shifting from that announcement and Dallas’s incompetence, Charania had another blockbuster trade in his drafts, waiting to form an aftershock to the preceding earthquake.

After weeks of flirting and aggressive eye contact, the Spurs executed a three-team, seven-player deal with the Sacramento Kings and Chicago Bulls, involving All-Stars De’Aaron Fox and Zach LaVine.

There were some other NBA veterans included, such as Kevin Huerter, whose Light the Beam era came to a close on his way to Chi-Town, and former Trail Blazers first-round pick Zach Collins also packed his bags for Illinois.

But hidden in the collection of names and draft pick verbiage of the X post—which is sitting at an astounding 25 million impressions—is a name that few fans or media personalities were familiar with.

Kings receive Sidy Cissoko.

Going from playing with fellow Frenchman Victor Wembanyama to arriving in a horrible Sacramento situation would be humbling for any player. But those matters didn’t last more than two days, as on the same day Cissoko had his introductory media scrum, he was traded to the Washington Wizards for veteran international big man Jonas Valančiūnas.

This was Sidy Cissoko in February 2025, just two days after being traded from San Antonio to Sacramento.

After this introductory media scrum, he was traded again to Washington and subsequently waived before he could even change his Instagram bio.

Tonight—646 days after his NBA… pic.twitter.com/Yz8UiBVQdB

— Sahal Arwo (@ArwoNBA) November 13, 2026

Two trades in two days is a story you’ll hear in a podcast episode someday in the future, but the story isn’t complete yet.

The day after being acquired, the Wizards waived Cissoko, who was later claimed by the Portland Trail Blazers on a two-way contract.

Being a member of four NBA teams in under a week is on Dennis Schröder levels of career movement and can add a feeling of uncertainty and instability that very few professions can equate to.

“Thank God for that first,” said Cissoko on February 18, 2025, 10 days after inking his two-way contract. “It was a tough two weeks for me. I’m lucky I got a two-way. It could be way worse.”

Cissoko seemed pained when saying those words, almost as if still felt like things could get worse.

At rock bottom in his young NBA career, Portland felt like it would be Cissoko's last chance to make it work in the U.S., the apparent “Land of Opportunity.”

Another Team's Treasure

If an NBA career was a trip across the Atlantic Ocean, then a standard guaranteed contract would be like crossing it in a huge ship.

Stable. Comfortable. And, by avoiding any major disaster, will get you to your destination of generational wealth and an illustrious career.

Now, a two-way contract? That’s more of an equivalent to setting out across that expansive ocean on one of the lifeboats from the Titanic.

Many people can lay claim to one and cling to it for dear life, but very few can make it across the unpredictable waters and vigorous demands to get to the other side.

After some of the hardest weeks of his life, a lifeboat was all Sidy Cissoko needed.

“[My coaches] said every player here in the NBA gets at least one opportunity one day,” Cissoko told Bergin. He was adamant that being a part of the Trail Blazers was his.

Back in Portland, where he first announced himself to the United States at the Hoop Summit just three years earlier, Cissoko was just ready to put his best foot forward.

At the time of his arrival, the Trail Blazers were 23-31 and sliding down the Western Conference standings. It didn’t matter much to Cissoko, who began his tenure in Oregon with the Rip City Remix.

There weren’t too many eyes on him yet, but in those minutes in the G League, there was an underlying story.

Sharing minutes and reps with Cissoko on the Remix was his French compatriot, Rayan Rupert. The two were longtime national team teammates for France, and Rupert was taken just one pick (43rd overall) before Cissoko in 2023.

Being on a two-way contract, the hope is to outperform a player on a standard contract with your parent club or a player on another team to potentially take their spot. Though he tried to downplay it, Cissoko knew his NBA future would likely be decided by competition with Rupert, a player he’d known since his youth days in Europe.

"In basketball there’s always competition, it’s been that way since the beginning of our careers," Cissoko told outlet BE Basketball in a March 2025 interview regarding Rupert, "But there’s no competition, we help each other, we like each other"

And so the work began over the summer, with a clear goal and target set for Cissoko to achieve.

After a complex start to the 2025-26 Trail Blazers season, with then-head coach Chauncey Billups arrested after Game 1, interim head coach Tiago Splitter stepped up to the helm, one of the instances that would change Cissoko’s career trajectory.

By the seventh game of the season, Cissoko was in the regular rotation. By Game 15, due to an influx of injuries, he was a starter.

Once Splitter gave him that confidence and opportunity, he never looked back and became a mainstay rotation piece on a very young and exciting Portland team that went on to make the playoffs for the first time since 2021.

However, every game that passed was another game closer to decision time in Portland's front office.

By rule, Two-way contract players can only appear in 50 regular-season games before they are either stuck in the G League or must be converted to a standard NBA contract.

That decision for Portland with Sidy Cissoko had a deadline in February 2026, a year after he joined the team on a two-way deal.

So the franchise was forced to choose, and historically for Cissoko, when a front office needed to make a contractual decision about him, it rarely went in his favor.

But on February 20 2026, Cissoko signed a two-year, semi-guaranteed contract with the Portland Trail Blazers, a move that resulted in Rupert being waived.

As bittersweet as it was to see his best friend and countryman end up in the same situation he was in after being waived by Washington a year prior, for once, Cissoko was on the right side of an NBA transaction.

In an interview with Sean Highkin, Cissoko assured that the hunger and gritty defensive presence he’d established while being a two-way player would carry forward, hopefully for the foreseeable future in Portland.

“I'm not going to change because of my contract. It's the same Sidy,” Cissoko told Highkin, "I really want to play here 12 or 13 years. Portland since day one has trusted me."

Blooming In Rose City

So here we are, present day, looking at a Portland team in the middle of one of its best starts in franchise history and riding a three-game win streak.

Those three wins came in a baseball-style series against Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Oklahoma City Thunder, followed by a trip down to Sacramento, home of the team that Cissoko played for in exactly zero games.

The highlight of all three? Cissoko’s stellar performances as a starter, taking on the role for the first time this season.

The same teams that passed him over without giving him a fair chance to prove himself, are now watching him emerge as a valuable piece of Portland's present and future. While his journey has been anything but straightforward, perhaps that's what makes his emergence all the more remarkable.

Now, if I were to ask Cissoko if he would like to relive those weeks of uncertainty in 2025, I doubt he would say yes. The mental struggles he had endured during that span were heartbreaking to witness.

But in his trek from France to Spain to the G League and a topsy-turvy road to becoming an NBA regular, there is one thing that can be certain about Sidy.

He's no longer in a lifeboat, but finally steering a huge ship.