This article discusses several things about the basketball business in Europe, including the NBA's influence on style of play, talent drain and potential NBA investment in Europe. There are several parallels to the big Euro soccer club's interest in the States. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6537-2003Sep13.html
Good stuff... Thanks for posting. There is absolutely no difference between the NBA staging exhibitins in Europe and Champions World. (Except that the NBA has been doing it for decades and CW just started.) I guess there would be nothing to prevent the NBA from expanding into Europe since the the basketball equivalent of FIFA has much less power.
if they did put one or more nba teams in europe that would be one hell of a road trip. and while i think living in madrid of barcelona would be awesome, i dont think most americans drafted in the nba would even consider it. i mean people complain about playing in toronto!
ESPN also has an article about possible NBA expansion to Europe in the future. http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?columnist=spears_marc&id=1614726
I think an "EBA" would be a great idea. Use the top 28 teams from all over Europe. It would soon rival the NBA and would be a great thing for the game itself.
The NBA, like ManU this past summer, isn't interested in promoting the sport so much as the brand. I wonder, if given the chance, Real Madrid or Barcelona would ante up the money for an NBA franchise?
Personally, i don't like Basketball, but if this league were to be set up with a team in London, i would goto at least some of the matches. It would just be fun to see the NBA teams play here. I also know that stockholm would do really well, as basketball is actually cared more about there than the above article leads on (i spent 5 years there). I really hope they can pull this off, as it would be great fun to see!
i think that it's a wonderful idea. american sports (and fans) will only flourish with the added globalization to the game.
This will not happen in the next 20 years, if ever. The first and the obvious reason is the distance. The other is the incompatibility of the structures. European teams produce their players through the youth system and wouldn’t allow those players to go on a free draft. Crazy Yank, there already is a Euro league. Very similar to the CL in soccer, there is a group stage and then the knockout system. The competition is a half a century old. The clubs of course also play their national leagues. To earn enough money to compete with NBA for players the top European teams would have to leave their national leagues and play a full European season with at least 50 regular season games and play-offs. That is also way of in the future, because of nationalism and the tradition of the national leagues. The article also talks about the Americanization of European basketball. This is much more true for northern Europe than for the east and the south. Basketball has been the #2 sport in the east and south for a very long time and it has it’s own culture largely uninfluenced by NBA. In the North basketball only became popular with the expansion of NBA in the early nineties and there you will see a lot of American influences. But you will never hear the D-fence chant in Piraeus, Split or Bologna.