NBA London announcement is statement of serious intent

The Chicago Bulls take on the Utah Jazz in last year's pre-season friendly at London's O2 Arena

The National Basketball Association (NBA) announced yesterday that regular season games would be played in Europe this season for the first time ever.

On 4th and 5th March 2011 the Toronto Raptors will take on the New Jersey Nets at London’s O2 Arena.

The news comes as a statement of intent from the league and is encouraging not only for its own global ambitions, but also for British basketball, the O2 Arena itself, ESPN and many other interested parties alongside.

The latest pre-season friendly, due to be played between the LA Lakers and the Minnesota Timberwolves in October, sold out in record time, and the games in March will no doubt go a similar way.

Although at first glance the Nets against the Raptors doesn’t seem like the most glamorous match-up, dig a little deeper and it makes sense for both teams.

The Raptors, shorn this summer of their star players Chris Bosh and Hedo Turkoglu, have nonetheless one of the most international rosters in the league (including four European players). They are also the only Canadian team in the league and are bound to find support in London.

Although the revenue distribution model has not yet become apparent, the games are likely to provide a financial boost for the Nets in particular. The team suffered a truly abysmal season on-court last year, with attendances to match. The team, it seems, is still nothing special, but the Nets, more than any other franchise, have their eye on the global stage. The franchise also has an intriguing ownership structure that includes Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and rap mogul Jay-Z, and a chief executive in Brett Yormark who consistently pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in sports marketing.

For the Nets, the London games will represent a chance to showcase themselves as the NBA’s global representatives, as well as the lucrative opportunity to become Britain’s favourite New York team ahead of a much-heralded move to Brooklyn.

ESPN, the American network which has spent heavily on the English Premier League in a bid to break the British market, will be delighted at the news. The channel also carries the NBA in England.

‘Growing the game globally’ has long been the NBA’s mantra and increased and meaningful exposure in foreign territories is always going to be the surest means of achieving this.

‘Growing the game globally’ has long been the NBA’s mantra and increased and meaningful exposure in foreign territories is always going to be the surest means of achieving this. British kids, of course, are more likely to be inspired and a strong Team GB will be the ultimate outcome.

“This to us is really within the context of giving as much support as we can to the sport of basketball for the 2012 Olympics,” NBA commissioner David Stern said in a conference call announcing the dates. And that, as far as it goes, is true. Over the last two years Stern has made the repeated promise that a regular season NBA game would be played in London before the 2012 Games.

By the time the Raptors take on the Nets in March, four pre-season friendly games will have been hosted at the O2 Arena since 2007 – all of them unmitigated successes. The basketball competition at the Olympics, even without the help of a profile-raising series of NBA league games, was always likely to be popular.

As much as the league games will bring Londoners closer to the game ahead of the Olympics, give Britons a passion for Team GB, they will also, crucially, align the NBA closer with the Olympic movement.

Perhaps more than any established league sport, the NBA has taken to using the Olympics as the ultimate platform for its global expansion plans. Talking to several senior NBA executives in the months and years after the Beijing Games, I was struck by how frequently they all pressed home the point that five NBA players carried their nation’s flags into the Birds Nest stadium in 2008. Becoming a truly international league, in terms of its participants, its audience, and now its venues, is item number one on the NBA’s agenda.

Of course, the plan is not ground-breaking. The National Football League (NFL) and, to a certain extent, Major League Baseball (MLB) are both thinking along similar lines. But neither football nor baseball has the type of global popularity and accessibility that basketball has, and the NBA has undoubtedly capitalised on that.

Pre-season games have been played around the world for some years now; regular season games have already been played in Japan and Mexico; and serious ground has been made in the rush to mobilise China as major market. With an estimated 450 million basketball fans in China, the NBA now has a fully-established, US$2 billion-valued entity in place in the country to deal with all of its interests in the Far East.

In fact, that aspect of the business having prospered under the leadership of Heidi Ueberroth, China seemed destined to become the territory the NBA officially colonised first.

Europe, however, is still a key and, crucially, developed market for the NBA and with yesterday’s announcement, the attention must surely shift back to the continent. Though Stern was unusually coy about the possibility of forming a fully paid up division of the NBA in Europe, the intent is clearly there and has been for some time.

Two months ago I spoke to Donald Dell, formerly Michael Jordan’s agent and a key figure in the NBA’s success over the years. He is a man who knows David Stern’s mind almost as well as his own. Dell was of the firm opinion that the NBA would launch a division in Europe as soon as the requisite NBA-style arenas had been constructed.

With at least eight first class arenas now scattered across the continent, and the latest announcement signalling the league’s willingness to branch out, another David Stern Europe-themed announcement is, one would imagine, likely to happen sooner rather than later.

jemmett@sportspromedia.com