Can the N.B.A. Find a Basketball Superstar in India?

It is, Ranadivé believes, the perfect sport for India. “I won’t be greedy and say we’re going to replace cricket as the national pastime,” he says. “But I’ll be greedy and say we’ll become a strong No. 2.”

When Adam Silver, the commissioner of the N.B.A., started working full time for the league, he was a 30-year-old lawyer whose first assignment was to write a position paper about the Dream Team. It was 1992, and the American men’s Olympic basketball team, whose stars included Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, was about to become a sensation at the Summer Games in Barcelona. At the time, the N.B.A. was lukewarm about allowing its American stars to compete in the Olympics, but Silver argued it was best not just for the N.B.A. but also for the sport. As Silver ascended to the top of the N.B.A.’s hierarchy, he noticed that two phenomena tended to account for how young international players became interested in basketball. One was the Dream Team. The other was Michael Jordan videos. The lessons he took from this observation have become accepted wisdom: Expanding the N.B.A.’s global reach is as much about selling individual stars as about selling the sport itself.

In the nearly three decades since the Dream Team won the gold medal, the N.B.A. has become an increasingly international league, with roughly a quarter of its players coming from outside the United States, up from less than 5 percent at around the time of the Barcelona Olympics. Last season underscored just how global the N.B.A. has become. The Toronto Raptors were the first team from outside the United States to win a championship, and international players virtually swept the end-of-season awards. The M.V.P. was Giannis Antetokounmpo, born in Greece to Nigerian immigrants. The rookie of the year was Luka Doncic, who comes from Slovenia and whose game blossomed in Spain. The defensive player of the year was Rudy Gobert, from France, and the most improved player was Pascal Siakam, from Cameroon. That same month, Rui Hachimura became the first Japanese player selected in the first round of the N.B.A. draft.

Benchmarks like these show how far the league has come from the days when Silver’s predecessor as commissioner, David Stern, shipped video cassettes to Italy in the 1980s so recorded games could be broadcast a week later. The international push has been decades in the making. In 1987, at the McDonald’s Open in Milwaukee, the Soviet national team played the Milwaukee Bucks and a professional Italian team. The next year, the Atlanta Hawks, then owned by Ted Turner, toured the Soviet Union. The first regular-season games to take place abroad followed in 1990, when the Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz played each other twice in Tokyo. The league now regularly puts on in-season games in cities like London and Mexico City, and preseason games worldwide — in China, Spain, the Philippines, Brazil. The N.B.A.’s growth abroad is especially striking when contrasted with that of the N.F.L., an older league that, despite its own efforts to appeal to international audiences, still has not gained a lasting foothold overseas. Major League Baseball has found audiences in Latin America and parts of Asia, but its spread has not been as swift and broad.

Source: The New York Times

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