NBA Has Gone Global and There’s No Turning Back

By: George Diaz, The Orlando Sentinel (KRT)
Posted In: Sports

LOS ANGELES _ The NBA executives are talking shop in the back seat of a taxicab in Shanghai, China. The cab driver eavesdrops and, as cab drivers often do, offers an unsolicited opinion.

“Steve Francis pass ball to Yao Ming!” he says in fractured English.

As Andrew Messick and his colleagues piece the information together, they figure out that the cab driver is upset that Jeff Van Gundy’s offense in Houston doesn’t include more plays with Yao as the primary option.

“It’s pretty bizarre when you think about it,” said Messick, the NBA’s international senior vice president. “This taxi driver is watching games early in the morning and has a view on how Coach Van Gundy is running the offense. It’s a small world we live in. It expresses the notion that sports allow people from widely divergent places to communicate in a language that’s compelling and wonderful. I didn’t know what to say.”

The NBA is no longer our game. It belongs to the world.

From Shanghai to Sacramento, Calif., Orlando, Fla., to the Australian Outback, Philadelphia to Paris, the league’s bouncy-bouncy soundtrack resonates loudly. You heard it last Sunday night during the glitzy introductions for the NBA All-Star Game, when six international players will be in the mix of 24 stars on two conference teams.

Fans voted in ballots printed in 17 languages. More than half of the traffic on nba.com (51 percent) is outside the United States.

The Internet will be a click away for fans, including Manouar Abdeslam, a 17-year-old from Morocco whose father rewards him for good grades with Orlando Magic souvenirs.

Among them is a Tracy McGrady jersey, bought in Paris by Manouar’s uncle.

“If that’s not an international game …,” said Bob Baydale, an Orlando businessman who met Manouar during an overseas trip, leaving the obvious answer dangling indefinitely.

A spike that began with the inclusion of the Dream Team _ basketball’s version of rock `n’ roll stars _ in the 1992 Olympics continues to rise dramatically, with the likelihood of the league expanding to several European cities within the next decade.

Travel logistics may be more demanding physically, but a seven-hour trip from London to New York isn’t much more of a strain than traveling from Orlando to Los Angeles.

“Believe it or not, (John) McEnroe and (Jimmy) Connors used to get off a plane in Shanghai and play in a tournament,” NBA Commissioner David Stern said. “Tiger Woods goes all over the world to play golf.”

Stern’s vision of world domination simply reflects a marketing-savvy approach to capture a broader audience that can’t get enough of the game and all of its accessories.

Reebok’s $130 Answer 6 Allen Iverson sneaker sold out in six weeks when it launched in October 2003 in Western Europe.

Spalding’s international sales spiked 44 percent in 2002, largely because of Ming-mania in China. Tony Parker (France), Dirk Nowitzki (Germany) and Peja Stojakovic (Serbia and Montenegro) are telling folks to drink Sprite in native-language commercials overseas. An estimated 30 percent of all NBA merchandise is sold overseas.

Fans who want a more exotic location than Orlando to check out the NBA City theme restaurant can travel to one in the Dominican Republic.

Marketing the game is easy enough. Although soccer remains the most popular game in the world with an estimated 1.25 billion fans, basketball has an easy-access feel to it _ find a ball and a basket _ that allows for crossover appeal throughout the continents.

Interest continues to rise as more foreign players ditch their professional teams overseas to play in the NBA.

Opening night, NBA rosters featured a record 73 international players from 34 countries. Six of them _ Yao, Nowitzki, Stojakovic, Jamaal Magloire (Canada), Tim Duncan (U.S. Virgin Islands) and Andrei Kirilenko (Russia) _ played in the All-Star Game last weekend.

Players who could think only of playing in the NBA as whimsical folly now have no problem snagging a passport and visa to play in New Jersey, Memphis or Los Angeles. An increasing interest in recruiting international players with a better feel for fundamentals and up-tempo team style, coupled with the NBA steadily improving its global outreach through television broadcasts and the Internet, allows both sides to come together without a glitch.

That wasn’t possible a decade ago, when children overseas had a limited vision of the NBA. Growing up in the Republic of Georgia, which borders the Black Sea between Turkey and Russia, 8-year-old Zaza Pachulia stuck posters of NBA stars Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman and Rod Strickland in his room. He got them inside basketball magazines, his only connection to the NBA.

He dreamed of living large one day, not knowing that he would grow to be a talented basketball player. Signed by a professional team in Turkey at 15, Pachulia, now 20, was drafted by the Magic in the second round last June.

He joins another foreign import, Gordan Giricek of Croatia, on the Magic’s roster.

Strickland, then a standout with the New York Knicks during his days as a poster boy, is now Pachulia’s teammate.

“In time, they started showing highlights,” Pachulia said. “Everything is improving, then they started putting games on TV.”

A foreign invasion that started inconspicuously with the arrival of Hakeem Olajuwon from Nigeria has risen dramatically, with nine foreign players taken in the opening round of the 2003 NBA Draft.

NBA teams now employ scouts on three or four continents. The Magic nearly have doubled their international budget from a year ago.

“Today there are kids in Germany, Spain and France who are looking at their country’s heroes playing in the NBA,” Messick said.

The NBA gives them plenty of opportunity. There were be 325 journalists from 41 countries covering the festivities at Staples Center on Sunday night. In 1992, there were 87 broadcasters showing games in 105 countries and territories.

Sunday night, 212 countries were watching.

The year 1992 is significant. The NBA’s reach grew dramatically that year in Barcelona, Spain, when the original Dream Team came to town and captivated the world. Opposing players would ask Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird for autographs before games. Reporters would scramble to get closer to them in the frenzy of the Olympic mixed-zone interview area. Fans surrounded their hotel rooms, where security was tight.

America’s game had touched the world, beckoning everyone to take a peek.

“People saw it, and they wanted more,” Stern said. “And we hope that we’ll reprise that in Athens, the modern version. We won’t call it the Dream Team.

“Team USA, with the great players we have, are going to show people how great it is.”

The U.S. team competing in the 2004 Summer Olympics this summer will face significant competition from a world no longer intimidated or looking for autographs. Although the United States has won all three Olympic competitions since the inception of the Dream Team, there have been issues in other international events. Team USA finished sixth at the 2002 World Basketball Championship in Indianapolis, losing to Argentina, Yugoslavia and Spain.

Humbled and humiliated, the United States had to qualify for an Olympic berth in the Tournament of the Americas in Puerto Rico last summer, which it did easily with a roster of shooting stars including McGrady and Iverson.

Competition will continue to rise as the league continues to expand its presence across the world.

Stern, visiting Orlando in January, said then that he and other league officials recently met with a potential group of investors to chat about expanding to Europe.

“They’re commissioning a study with a consulting firm to analyze the media, the sports and the stadium situation in Europe,” Stern said.

The key sticking point is developing an infrastructure of new stadiums that would be large enough to host games.

The league will continue to give overseas fans a sneak peek with exhibition games in Europe, Latin America and Asia, including an inaugural game in China in 2004.

Recent exhibitions have been staged between the Memphis Grizzlies and San Antonio Spurs in France, the Dallas Mavericks and Utah Jazz in Mexico City and the Grizzlies vs. FC Barcelona in Spain. The Los Angeles Clippers and Seattle SuperSonics opened this regular season with two games in Tokyo.

“I was sitting with a fan in Tokyo who was from Mexico,” Stern said. “She was visiting from Guadalajara and was taping, using an inch-thick mini-camcorder. I was scratching my head. On the other side of me were folks from Shanghai and Beijing because they’re going to host the Rockets and Sacramento Kings next October.

“There really is a coming together of the world.”