Hacker: Time for NBA to go global

Although basketball has never been the most popular sport this side of the Atlantic, in its heyday the sport drew large television audiences and crowds of thousands, even here in Scotland. The exploits of clubs such as Edinburgh’s own Boroughmuir, and latterly Murray International, funded by David Murray in the days before he took his considerable wealth to Ibrox, on the European stage had Scottish basketball at an all-time high, with players such as Bill McInnes and Iain MacLean still held in very high regard not only in Scotland, but throughout the UK."

Basketball is undergoing a bit of a renaissance in the UK just now, in no small part due to the prospect of Team GB competing in the London Olympics in 2012. The addition of NBA superstars Luol Deng and Ben Gordon to the GB squad has brought more and more international attention to the game in this country, as has the NBA’s Europe Live tour, in which pre-season games between NBA teams are played in selected European cities. These have proven to be extremely popular with basketball fans from around Europe, nowhere more so than in London, where British fans were recently treated to a thriller between Deng’s Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz.

The commercial success of ventures such as these have led NBA Commissioner, David Stern, to make some interesting comments in recent weeks concerning the possibility of playing a real, live, competitive NBA fixture in London. This would be a first for a League so convinced of its own singular importance that it crowns its annual champs the “NBA World Champions”, despite the small matter of there having been no other competing nations, yet it is almost certainly something that would be wholeheartedly and enthusiastically embraced by the British basketball public. Stern’s admission that the NBA was, “running out of runway a little bit, but we still hope to [play a regular season game in London]", has given hope to fans of the NBA in Great Britain, who have seen the NFL, one of the NBA’s main competitors, bring a regular season game to Wembley Stadium in each of the previous two seasons, with a further match coming this month.

The NBA is yet to play a competitive match outside of the USA or Canada, despite basketball being second only to football in terms of global popularity and if the NBA wishes to continue to expand upon basketball’s popularity outside of North America then bringing competitive action to our shores is easily the best way to do that. Fans here already snap up tickets for games in which the star players are held back, with fitness and practice being the main concerns for players and coaches alike; imagine the interest there would be in a game in which the result is the most important thing. There are few more impressive sights than seeing some of the world’s top athletes, which NBA players most certainly are, pushing themselves to the brink, and the NBA could sell-out any regular season game in Great Britain four or five times over.

Competitive NBA basketball in Great Britain would be a huge boost to the sport in the run up to the London Olympics, and a major help in the efforts of the games' governing bodies in the UK to build a post-London basketball legacy, so that British, and hopefully Scottish, basketball can regain its once lofty status sooner rather than later.