The NBA, Fans and Globalization
David Stern is going overseas, but will anybody follow him?
It’s good that David Stern and company are going international with the NBA. Who can blame them? It all comes back to one single, all-powerful, corrupting factor: money.
Stern sees dollar bills on the horizon. He sees exposure for his league and financial security for his product. He wants stores in China and France and Germany and Russia to sell NBA products. He wants his league to break down communication barriers and rescue itself from the disaster that American basketball has become.
But there’s a problem to this whole overseas scenario: Stern’s international sprint is just a band aid for the real problem, which lies in the hearts and minds of American sports fans. What will it take to get the American public back into basketball?
Football took over the title of “America’s pastime” several years ago. No one is sure when it happened, but somehow, sitting in front of the television on Sundays with wings and hot dogs and burgers and beers became better than going to the ballpark for a day and spending your life’s savings on parking, tickets, food and gas.
Americans are locked into football. It is everything that modern Americana has become. And basketball is so far off of the average person’s radar that some lost souls don’t even know who wins the championship ever year. It will take a revolutionary movement in the NBA to get the average viewer back, and Stern doesn’t looking look like he’s headed anywhere near your backyards to try and bring you back from the dark side. In fact, he’s probably not interested in you at all.
The NBA has slowed to a crawl in the last decade. The fast-paced, team game that once was has vanished with regular Nintendo and cassette tapes. It is a boring game now. Walk the ball up the court, isolate the best player, and go. There is no ball movement and there is no speed, which is interesting, considering that the athletic ability of the average player has skyrocketed in recent years.
With the expansion of the league, the talent is diluted and weak. On most teams in the NBA, there is one player worth watching. Twenty years ago, there were at least three or four players per team worthy of your attention. The Celtics had six Hall of Famers on their squad at one point.
The intensity of play hasn’t helped either, and guaranteed contracts are to blame for the massive lack of spirit and hustle and mental toughness that embodied so many predecessors of the modern game.
So this leads to a monotonous sport, which leads to the low ratings. And instead of trying to get you back, Stern is heading elsewhere, like an animal that’s trying to find a new feeding ground.
There is Yao Ming and now there is Yi Jianling, a big and athletic forward from China who was taken high in the NBA Draft this season. That surely will draw more viewers and listeners and revenue, jump starting the globalization of the league that began in the bowels of a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Stern might be fixing the NBA’s financial situation on a temporary basis, but the real problem remains alive and well. It’s the product that has declined, and you can market it all you want and make as much money off of it as you can before the well runs dry. But the product is what David Stern is selling, and the quality in his product is almost gone.
Let’s hope Stern realizes where the solution to his problem lies.
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