The NBA'S Global Game Plan

By Daniel Eisenberg

Adjusting to the daily grind, physical play and endless stream of hotel suites can be tough for any rookie in professional basketball. But when the Dallas Mavericks' Dirk Nowitzki first moved to the NBA four years ago, he faced more of a culture shock than most. Nowitzki, a seven-footer from Germany, couldn't play much defense (which earned him the nickname "Irk") and was briefly tagged, as many European imports are, a "soft" player who shies away from contact. He often found himself riding the bench, so he had lots of time to work on his English.

Now he couldn't feel more at home. An All-Star for the second straight year and the league's sixth leading scorer, Nowitzki, 24, like Houston Rockets center Yao Ming and Sacramento Kings forward Peja Stojakovic, belongs to a swelling corps of international players who are winning hearts, minds and dollars, both in the U.S. and abroad. While helping make basketball arguably the world's fastest-growing sport, he and the other sharpshooting globetrotters have managed to captivate hard-to-please hoops fans in the U.S. "Nowitzki's just a freak. He's too big for the small forwards to guard and too quick for the centers," says Aaron Offeyer, 23, a Dallas native and Maverick fan who was sporting his hero's jersey at a road game against the New York Knicks.

Memphis Grizzlies sensation Pau Gasol, a gangly 7-ft. native of Spain who can handle and shoot the ball like a 6-ft. guard, last year became the first European player to win Rookie of the Year. This year Yao is a favorite to become the first Asian to get the honor. Meanwhile, Russian-born 6-ft. 9-in. forward Andrei Kirilenko is helping his elders John Stockton and Karl Malone keep the Utah Jazz in the play-off hunt. "There are going to be a lot of us," says Gasol. "We're proving we can play here."

They are also proving that the game can play overseas. The NBA is putting the finishing touches on plans to hold several of next year's preseason games in Europe, Latin America and Asia, including China. By the end of the decade, predicts NBA commissioner David Stern, "there will be multiple NBA teams in Europe," either as regular expansion franchises or in a separate league. Developers are starting to build modern European arenas to help promote expansion of the game. Some observers have suggested staging a Ryder Cup of pro basketball, with U.S. stars battling a team of their international colleagues, perhaps in place of the traditional East-West All Star matchup, as the National Hockey League now does.

What began as a trickle in the 1980s, with the arrival of occasional foreign stars like Hakeem Olajuwon (Nigeria) and the late Drazen Petrovic (Croatia), has turned into a flood. This season a record 65 players from 34 countries and territories outside the U.S. are suiting up, accounting for 16% of the league's rosters, compared with only 6% a decade ago. A third of the 18 players chosen for the All-Star Weekend's Rookie-Sophomore game came from overseas, among them standouts like San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker (France), Denver Nuggets forward Nene Hilario (Brazil) and Orlando Magic guard Gordan Giricek (Croatia).

Six players, including Yao, were taken in the first round of last year's draft, and 10 or more could go that high this year. Serbian seven-footer Darko Milicic, 17, is widely expected to be the second pick after LeBron James, the high school sensation from Akron, Ohio. It's no coincidence that the three best teams so far this season (and those with the best shot at dethroning the L.A. Lakers as NBA champs) are the Kings, Mavericks and Spurs, all aided by an abundance of foreign talent. (With Stojakovic and center Vlade Divac on the Kings, some fans have dubbed the team the Sacramento Serbs.)

None of this comes as much of a surprise to Commissioner Stern, who has been consciously building the NBA into a global brand since before the Dream Team made its debut at the Barcelona Olympics a decade ago. "These kids have grown up watching Michael Jordan," Stern says of the NBA's new foreign stars. "Basketball is a universal language, and it's about to bloom on a global basis." Stern is counting on that, especially at a time when the NBA's popularity, at least judging by TV ratings and attendance figures, seems to have reached its peak in the U.S.

The global appeal is filling the NBA's coffers. About 20% of all NBA merchandise--including NBA Cologne in Spain and NBA school supplies in Latin America--is now sold outside the U.S., providing an extra $430 million in annual revenue. And that doesn't include the countless knock-off jerseys with creative team names like the San Jose Bulls that fly off Third World shelves. The NBA is building an NBA City theme restaurant in the Dominican Republic (the other one is in Orlando, Fla.) and is thinking of opening freestanding NBA stores in Asia and Europe. Separate NBA boutiques exist in big department stores like El Corte Ingles in Spain. Nearly 15% of the league's $900 million in annual TV revenue (excluding local broadcasts) is now derived from its 148 television partners in 212 countries and territories. Some 40% of visitors to NBA.com (which includes sites in Spanish, Japanese and, since mid-January, Chinese) log on from outside the U.S., and a million fans pay $10 a month to listen to streaming English or Spanish audio of almost any game.

Gatorade, Lego and Adidas, among others, have signed on as the NBA's global marketing partners, spreading the basketball gospel through clinics, festivals and tournaments. In October another marketing partner, Reebok, launched Philadelphia star Allen Iverson's sneaker, the $130 Answer 6, across much of Western Europe. It sold out in six weeks. International markets now account for 30% of Reebok's sales, up from 10% two years ago. Thanks in large part to the Yao-inspired basketball craze in China, Spalding's international sales grew 44% in 2002. And Sprite has joined with players like Nowitzki, Stojakovic and Parker to help peddle the soft drink in their native lands.

The NBA's moves, however, aren't working on every court. In many foreign countries, pro athletes have less of a tradition of endorsing products than their American counterparts, and some of the league's newest stars aren't quite ready for their close-up.

"I don't like to be in the spotlight too much," says the shaggy-haired, goatee-sporting Nowitzki. As a teenager, he would stay up most of the night with his buddies to watch NBA play-off games on TV and then stagger into school bleary-eyed. The late-night airing of games continues to pose an obstacle to the league's growth, causing many overseas companies to shy away from sponsorship deals.

As the world's game, basketball remains a distant second to soccer, which has fans in almost every country, totaling more than 1.25 billion. But there's no denying that basketball's appeal is on the rise, especially among younger, urban and middle-class fans. Like soccer, basketball is a relatively cheap game and easy to start playing. It requires only a ball and a makeshift hoop hung on a tree or the side of a house. In Mexico, there is scarcely a town that doesn't have at least one court, and even in impoverished Nigeria, many homes have a rim at the back, sometimes fashioned out of a bent tire iron. Basketball is the most popular school sport in China, where an estimated 250 million players shoot the ball with an NBA-influenced aggressiveness and flash that were seldom seen just a few years ago.

The league's new diversity is also building enthusiasm at home. With four of their combined 10 starters hailing from Canada or Europe, Sacramento and Dallas are the league's two most exciting teams, playing an up-tempo, international style with lots of movement and passing. It's a welcome departure from the NBA's one-on-one isolation game, in which eight men are mere spectators on many plays. Thanks to their firm grasp of the fundamentals, "foreign players have added the skill factor back into the game," says Kings head coach Rick Adelman.

Just as important, most of the foreign imports "are complete players, not specialists," notes Hall of Fame center Bill Walton, now an analyst for ESPN. The Europeans, in particular, are typically taught the basics by iron-willed coaches who have zero tolerance for showboating or big egos. The players learn to handle zone defenses, which, unlike man-to-man, require every player to hit the outside shot. And pressure doesn't faze them.

"Playing for their national team, it's not unusual to have an entire nation watching their every move, shot and pass," observes Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who has used foreign players like the Mavs' Mexican forward Eduardo Najera to market the team to Hispanic fans in Texas.

But sheer skill or poise may not be the only reason these new arrivals are generating so much excitement. It's no secret that over the past few decades the NBA has been dominated by African Americans. Some observers argue that the addition of high-profile white and Asian stars is bringing new fans to the sport, both in the U.S. and abroad. Stern insists that "race is not a factor anymore" for those fans. But a 2001 study in the journal Economic Inquiry examined Nielsen TV ratings for local NBA broadcasts during the 1996-97 season and concluded that "all else equal, more fans tune in when there are more white players to watch."

In the quest for foreign stars, every team today employs scouts on three or four continents. They show up at tournaments and team practices all over the world. "There are no sleepers anymore," says David Fredman, assistant general manager for the Denver Nuggets. Many European teams play only two games a week, giving scouts fewer opportunities to see prospects in action. To protect their talent, some coaches often won't play their stars when an NBA scout is visiting. Lately scouts have been journeying to Brazil, Eastern Europe, Senegal and, of course, China in their search for the Next Big Thing.

If they keep earning those frequent-flyer miles, there's no telling how cosmopolitan the NBA will get. Some observers think as many as half the league's players could be foreign-born by the end of the decade, but Commissioner Stern calls that a stretch.

"The breadth and depth of American basketball talent are not going to be challenged," he says with a smile, conveniently ignoring the U.S.'s embarrassing early exit from last year's World Basketball Championship (the winner was Yugoslavia). But he is quick to add that by that time, the league could be deriving up to half its revenue from outside the U.S. The world doesn't have to take over the NBA, Stern would like to think, for the NBA to take over the world. --With reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas, Jackson Baker/Memphis, Sean Gregory/New York, Laura A. Locke/Sacramento, Adam Pitluk/Houston and foreign bureaus

With reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas, Jackson Baker/Memphis, Sean Gregory/New York, Laura A. Locke/Sacramento, Adam Pitluk/Houston and foreign bureaus