Jeremiah Zagar’s 2022 film casts Adam Sandler as a worn-out Philadelphia 76ers scout who stakes his job on an unknown player he finds in Spain, and fills the court with real NBA names to make the gamble look like the real thing.

In Hustle, released on Netflix in June 2022, Adam Sandler plays Stanley Sugerman, an international scout for the Philadelphia 76ers who has spent years living out of hotel rooms, looking for the next player worth a draft pick. Directed by Jeremiah Zagar from a script by Taylor Materne and Will Fetters, the film is a sports drama with a comic streak, built on a premise the genre knows well: a man near the end of his usefulness finds someone whose talent could change both their lives. What sets the project apart on paper is how much real basketball it pulls into the frame, from the arenas it shot in to the players it cast.

A scout, a pick-up game and a plane ticket

The story opens with a promotion that does not last. Rex Merrick, the 76ers owner played by Robert Duvall, likes Stanley and moves him to assistant coach, a job that would finally keep him at home with his wife, Teresa, played by Queen Latifah, and their daughter Alex (Jordan Hull). Rex dies that same night. His son Vince, played by Ben Foster, takes control of the team, and three months later Stanley is back on a plane as a scout, with an old friend, the agent Leon Rich, nudging him to leave the club altogether.

In Spain, after a planned scouting visit falls through, Stanley stumbles on a street game and on Bo Cruz, a construction worker who earns extra money hustling opponents on the court. Juancho Hernangómez plays Bo. As the plot lays it out, Bo had been invited to play in the United States at 15 but stayed home when his girlfriend became pregnant with their daughter, Lucia. He also carries an aggravated assault conviction from Spain, which gets him detained on arrival in America and hangs over everything that follows, since another arrest could mean deportation.

When Vince refuses to sign him, Stanley quits and bankrolls Bo himself, with six weeks to get him ready for the NBA Draft Combine. Standing in the way is Kermit Wilts, the projected second overall pick, played by the Minnesota Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards, whose trash talk is aimed squarely at Bo’s temper. Stanley’s own past surfaces along the way: the injured hand that ended his playing days came from a drunk-driving crash in college that also put him in jail for six months. Without giving away the final stretch, the plot runs through a viral video challenge, a combine that goes badly wrong and one last private game in front of team executives.

From a spec script to Netflix

Hustle took a few years to reach its final shape. In February 2018 Legendary Entertainment bought Materne’s script after a bidding war, with LeBron James and his SpringHill Company attached as producers alongside Roth/Kirschenbaum Films, and the music-video director Dave Meyers set to direct. In May 2020 Sandler joined the project, Netflix took over the rights from Legendary and Zagar replaced Meyers. Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions came aboard as a third banner, and the producing credits list James, Maverick Carter, Joe Roth, Jeff Kirschenbaum, Allen Covert and Sandler himself.

The director was an unusual choice for a Sandler vehicle. Zagar, born in South Philadelphia in 1981, came out of documentaries, most notably In a Dream (2008), a portrait of his father, the mosaic artist Isaiah Zagar, and Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart for HBO. His first narrative feature, We the Animals (2018), adapted Justin Torres’s novel about three brothers, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and earned five nominations at the Independent Spirit Awards. Sandler had seen that film and asked Zagar to read the Hustle script. Zagar has said he hesitated at first and came round once the idea of shooting basketball in a properly cinematic way took hold of him.

Philadelphia is all over the production, which also suits a director from the city. Shooting started there in October 2020, months into the pandemic, and moved through Coatesville Area High School, La Salle University’s Tom Gola Arena, where the combine was staged, Temple University’s Liacouras Center, Center City, the Italian Market, Manayunk and South Philadelphia, with extra days in Camden, New Jersey. In January 2022 the crew filmed at the Wells Fargo Center during an actual regular-season game between the Boston Celtics and the 76ers. Zak Mulligan was the cinematographer, and the score is by Dan Deacon, the Baltimore electronic musician who had mostly scored independent documentaries until then.

A cast stacked with real players

The casting is where the film puts its idea of authenticity on the record. Hernangómez was a working NBA forward, then with the Minnesota Timberwolves, and spent time away from the team to shoot his first acting role; his brother Willy Hernangómez appears as a member of the Spanish national team, alongside Felipe Reyes and Pierre Oriola. Anthony Edwards was an active NBA player too, and Kenny Smith, the former point guard turned television analyst, plays Leon. The list of players and coaches appearing as themselves runs long: Dirk Nowitzki, Luka Dončić, Trae Young, Julius Erving, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, Allen Iverson, Doc Rivers, Brad Stevens, Sergio Scariolo and Villanova’s Jay Wright are among them. Heidi Gardner plays Rex’s daughter Kat, and María Botto plays Bo’s mother, Paola.

For Sandler, Hustle arrived three years after Uncut Gems (2019), the Safdie brothers’ crime film that had already put him in a dramatic register, and it sits in a line of serious turns that runs back to Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and The Meyerowitz Stories (2017). The role brought him his first Screen Actors Guild nomination, for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, as well as the People’s Choice Award for comedy movie star of 2022 and nominations at the Satellite Awards and AARP’s Movies for Grownups. According to Netflix, it was the platform’s most-watched film between June 8 and 19, 2022, after a limited theatrical run that began on June 3.

The film’s genre ancestry is easy to trace. The professional with a damaged past who stakes everything on an outsider is the backbone of films such as Hoosiers (1986) and Jerry Maguire (1996), and Hustle follows that template openly: the scout, the raw prospect, the rival, the closed door and the last chance. What it adds to the formula is context rather than structure: a front office drama about the business of the draft, a story in which an agent and a scout matter as much as the player, and a city filmed inside its own gyms and arenas.

The real-world afterlife adds a footnote of its own. A few months after the premiere, Hernangómez scored 27 points in the EuroBasket 2022 final as Spain beat France for the title; he later left the NBA after seven seasons, joined Panathinaikos and won the EuroLeague in 2024. Zagar went on to direct for HBO’s Task, the Mark Ruffalo series, for which Deacon also wrote music, and he has an announced feature, The Painted Bride, with Jeremy Allen White attached. Deacon, for his part, moved on to studio films such as Venom: The Last Dance.

Seen from 2026, Hustle reads as a snapshot of a particular moment: Netflix, LeBron James’s company and Sandler’s own banner pooling resources around basketball, with a documentary filmmaker in charge and an NBA forward cast opposite one of the biggest comedy stars of his generation. Whether that mix lifts a familiar underdog story above its blueprint is a call each viewer will make. The ingredients, at least, were chosen with unusual care.