Beyond the Rim: What lies in store for the future of basketball in China?

Yao Ming’s career may be over. Or that’s what they say. The hairline fracture he sustained in Game 3 against the Los Angeles Lakers in this year’s playoffs is likely to keep him out for next season, at best. Forever, at worst.

This is certainly bad news for basketball fans in China … or is it? True, the Chinese like to see their own players on the court. The meeting of compatriots Yao and Yi Jianlian for the first time on November 9, 2007, in Yi’s first season with the Milwaukee Bucks, was the most watched game in NBA history. (Of course, 19 stations broadcasting to 200 million Chinese certainly helped set that record.) Yao has also, in all seven of his seasons in the NBA, been voted starting center for the Western Conference in each year’s All-Star Game, while Yi’s vote total has moved from fifth to third in just two NBA seasons (surpassing Chris Bosh and Paul Pierce, and now only behind LeBron James and Kevin Garnett for the starting forward position for the East). Both players’ vote counts are widely attributed to the large number of Chinese fans voting for them.

Yet neither Yao nor Yi has the best-selling jersey in China. Kobe Bryant claims that spot. Tracy McGrady takes third. Yao comes in tenth for the second year in a row, and Yi doesn’t even come close (granted, he’s only just finished his second season, in which he’s already played for two different teams). So if jersey sales are indicative of anything, it is that the NBA’s popularity extends beyond nationalism. And if jersey sales don’t mean a thing, perhaps web traffic does. The NBA was the only US company to make Google’s 2008 most popular keyword search list for China and is consistently the most searched sports term on Baidu.com. So says the NBA.

And the NBA believes what they say. Otherwise, it probably wouldn’t have taken China on as its second largest market (outside North America), establishing NBA China in January 2008 and then opening its first stores outside the United States in Beijing later that year in July. At the time, the two outlets – located in Wangfujing and The Place – were the only other NBA stores in existence besides the flagship in Manhattan. Three additional outlets have popped up since – one in Changsha and two in Shanghai.

With basketball’s popularity continuing to grow in China, the NBA sees the country as the next frontier – for merchandising, for branding, for potential talent scouting. But isn’t this the same old story? Just another way a floundering industry in the West is trying to capitalize upon the Chinese renkou?

Some of it definitely sounds fishy. Take the Mengniu NBA Basketball Disciple reality TV show, for instance. The premise: a nationwide search “to discover China’s next rising basketball star,” explained NBA commissioner David Stern in a video promoting the series. The opening episode of the league’s first reality show was broadcast on May 22 on Shandong TV and runs every Friday night until August 28, when one lucky person will win an all-expenses-paid trip to try out for the NBA Development League. This means even a 60-year-old grandpa can – and did – have a shot at realizing his b-balling dreams.

Clearly, there is entertainment value to be exploited here. Still, some of the NBA’s efforts also seem genuinely to be about developing players. The Amway Nutrilite Jr. NBA Challenge, for instance, was a four-month program for 8- to 12-year-olds that concluded in July and involved skills challenges, training camps and a final tournament. The winning team will represent China against a Jr. NBA team from Dallas at the 2010 All-Star Weekend in February.

Adidas, the official sponsor of the NBA, has also hosted annual summer basketball camps over the past couple of years, such as their Nations basketball camp, which took place in June at Beijing Sports University. The five-day event invited the country’s top 15- to 18-year olds to a training camp where they received mentorship from NBA-affiliated players and coaches, concluding with a roster of 14-15 players selected to participate in a similar camp this month, also in Dallas. Undoubtedly, many of these youths hope to be the next Yi Jianlian, whose participation in such a camp in 2002 facilitated his being drafted sixth overall by the Bucks in 2007.

While all these measures are giving young (and old) Chinese the hope that they might one day play in the NBA, this doesn’t exactly equate to basketball development in China. In fact, the Chinese Basketball Association reported a troubling RMB 115 million loss last season, due to overzealous predictions of the sport’s growing domestic reach. The RMB 265 million reportedly spent by the 18 CBA clubs for 2008-2009 brought in a return of just RMB 150 million, and the only thing that resulted from the doubling of games last season – from 200 to over 450 – was more salaries to pay, and more injuries to players.

Salaries were certainly an expenditure for the Yunnan Bulls, who were in so much financial trouble that the owner still hasn’t been able to pay the players. Meanwhile, Yao Ming recently bought out his old team, the Shanghai Sharks, in a deal costing an alleged USD 2.9 million – quite a bargain, considering Yao makes USD 15 million per season with the Rockets. CBA director Xin Lancheng has pointed the finger at the rising number of high-paid foreigners joining the league, calling them “difficult to manage.” Still, is it really such a bad idea to attract players from abroad? It does make games more exciting – Bonzi Wells was putting up Kobe Bryant-like numbers almost every night during his brief stint last season with the Shanxi Zhongyu. Plus, the USD 40,000 he reportedly signed for hardly compares to the over USD 1 million he made in his first year pro.

It is a worrying signal, however, when only one of the CBA’s top 20 scorers is Chinese – that being the 18th-ranked Wang Zhizhi. Perhaps it’s coincidence that Wang is also the only Chinese player with NBA experience (and the first Chinese player ever to play the NBA, for that matter). He’s even seen playoff action – in his first year playing with Dallas in 2001, the Mavericks made it into the second round of the playoffs, and he went even further in his last year in the league (2005), when his Miami Heat contended for the Eastern Conference title.

Perhaps it’s also coincidence that in 2007, Wang took the Bayi Rockets to the championship title in his first season back in the CBA. Regardless, it’s obvious that the NBA has had a positive effect. The CBA’s relatively healthy growth since its establishment in 1995 can, in part, be attributed to the NBA’s presence in China since as early as 1979, when the then-Washington Bullets played – and lost – two exhibition games against the Chinese national team.

What the past season demonstrates, though, is that the CBA is a long way off from being the next NBA, and it still lacks an infrastructure strong enough to sustain rapid expansion. So while it’s grand for the NBA to have plans to develop 12-25 stadiums in China over the next few years, that doesn’t mean much unless they can make something happen with Wukesong. Likewise, China’s State General Administration of Sports needs to do more than build courts in 800,000 rural villages – concrete alone will not stimulate the 40 percent of children in China who regard basketball as their favorite sport to turn off their televisions and pick up the ball.

The thing about basketball is that you don’t need a stadium. You don’t even need a court. All you really need is a basket and a ball. And there are places in the world that define these as a crate and any round object that bounces. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and people always find a way in China. The only question that remains is: Do they have a will to play?