Word: nba
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...NBA commissioner David Stern has already executed a beautiful pivot move into China, where, thanks in part to Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, hoops is hotter than Sichuan cooking. There's still work to be done in Europe, even though it is now a source of many NBA players, including seven Frenchmen and six Slovenes. Before the season, the Philadelphia 76ers and Phoenix Suns played exhibition games in Germany, a challenging NBA country, as part of a four-team, five-country full-court press of Europe -Italy, Spain, France and Russia were also hosts of training camps and games...
...Expanding to the world's second most populous market hardly seems loony. After all, no American sports league has exported its brand better than the NBA, which sells more than $750 million in merchandise overseas annually. Its games are broadcast in 215 countries. And India offers a growing, tech-savvy economy with a billion potential consumers - 60% of whom are below age 30 - who could sop up NBA merchandise and follow their favorite players on NBA.com...
...cracked concrete court, adjacent to a scrubby field, in New Delhi. The government places less emphasis on sports growth, and trumpeting the country's hoops tradition is like bragging about America's team-handball stars. "I can't tell you there's a groundswell calling for the NBA in India," Stern admits...
...household name, whereas hardly anyone out there knows me," complains 6-ft. 5-in. Jaishankar Menon, a former standout on the Indian national team. Another foot would surely help him. "What we need now is a Yao Ming," says Sharma, the Indian roundball raja. "Once Yao played in the NBA, the color of China changed. It became a basketball nation. If we have an Indian playing in the NBA, the color of this country will change...
...NBA, with the help of several marketing partners, is searching for that Indian star. In December the league will dispatch a group of top executives to the subcontinent for its first Indian basketball summit. They will finalize initiatives like coaching clinics, refurbished neighborhood courts and youth- development camps. The NBA is talking to Time Warner (the parent of TIME) about producing hoops-related programming on Pogo TV, the company's Indian children's channel, and to espn Star Sports, a joint venture of Disney and News Corp., about increasing the league's presence on the network's Indian sports channels...