“His accent is his signature, and, even today, hearing it brings me back to all the nights I stayed up to watch games,” Diaw said.

Five years ago, Canal Plus lost the French television rights to the N.B.A., but Eddy still blogs about the league for the network and regularly appears on sports talk shows. In February, Eddy sat down for an interview in his office in Paris to reminisce about his beginnings at Canal Plus and his role in the N.B.A.’s evolution from a niche to the face of basketball in France, supplanting for many fans the country’s homegrown version.

Eddy, 60, might be quick at staging his own wackiness — the silly T-shirt he wore that day read, “I’m the Michael Jordan of 55 yr. old gym rats” — but there’s a steeliness inside him that helped spur his success in France. He traces it back to his childhood near Orlando, Fla., where — raised by a partly paralyzed American father and a blind French mother — he dreamed of becoming a professional basketball player.

“Maybe I wanted to prove early on that I could hold my own physically,” he said.

His ambition for an N.B.A. career was dashed at the University of Florida, where Eddy repeatedly fell short in his tryouts for the Gators. Still, he maintained his basketball obsession by playing one-on-one games on the campus. (Even years later, as a commentator, Eddy would routinely challenge retired N.B.A. players, including B. J. Armstrong, to games of H-O-R-S-E.)

Eventually, Eddy did go pro — in France. While visiting relatives near Paris in 1977, he asked if they knew of a court where he could practice. Basketball was so little played at the time that his relatives contacted the only option around: the professional team Alsace de Bagnolet. He went on to play 14 professional seasons in the French league.

In 1984, when he heard Canal Plus was hiring a commentator for its weekly broadcast of an N.B.A. game, Eddy sent in his résumé.