Andrea Bargnani is actually very charismatic

There has never been a time — not when he was playing, not when he was stuffing his face with pasta, not when he was answering the media’s harried questions — when Andrea Bargnani appeared to be charismatic. No, the 7-foot Italian usually looked distracted, or aloof, or vaguely disinterested in all that was going on around him. “Oh, I’m in the NBA?” his face seemed to say, “I honestly had no idea.”

Bargnani is no longer in the NBA, and, after seven long seasons, hasn’t been on the Toronto Raptors since 2013. But he haunts this franchise still as a symbol of the team’s long run of futility. Or maybe I just have a rather morbid fascination with him still — who’s to say, really?

A new commercial for the Turkish Airlines Euroleague Sixteen appeared today. The season starts next week on October 12th. This is not important in and of itself. What is important is that Bargnani is in the Euroleague on a team called Laboral Kutxa Baskonia.

And this commercial appears to fly in the face of everything we thought we knew about our old friend Bargs.

That’s Andrea Bargnani, with a gang of other Euroleague luminaries, planning an Ocean’s Eleven style heist, in which he is relied on to be, get this... THE SEXY DISTRACTION.

I don’t even know what else to say here.

Bargnani gets the best line in the commercial, he gets to boast about his Instagram followers, he “seduces” a girl, gets a drink thrown in his face, and then gets a chance to grab for the Euroleague trophy.

All this from slack-jawed, barely aware, forever out-to-lunch Andrea Bargnani!

What an international man of mystery.