How the Game Travels

The National Basketball Association has honed its image around the world as the purveyor of all that is hip, trendy, and cool. But there is one thing about the league that remains hopelessly anachronistic: its name. The NBA should really be called the IBA, replacing "National" with "International." The league is already making a large chunk of its fortune overseas; NBA commissioner David Stern predicts that, within the next decade, foreign broadcasts will reach 50 percent of U.S. television revenue. But the global influences manifest themselves in something far more obvious for even casual observers of the game: the rapid influx of foreign names and faces into a league that has long assumed the superiority of American players.

When U.S. basketball’s mad rush to globalize began in 1992 — the first time the world witnessed NBA players at an Olympic Games — the Dream Team waltzed through the competition, even signing autographs for starstruck opponents. Nevertheless, those Olympic broadcasts spawned a new generation of NBA hopefuls from Beijing to Buenos Aires. Before 1992, there were fewer than a dozen foreign-born players in the NBA. Last season, a whopping 81 foreign-born players from 35 different countries and territories crowded the league’s rosters. Only two teams lacked a foreign player, and the NBA champion San Antonio Spurs boasted three starters born outside the United States: Tim Duncan from the U.S. Virgin Islands, Tony Parker from France, and Manu Ginobili of Argentina.

Scouring the remotest regions of the Earth for teenage seven footers has become the rage among NBA teams. In the league’s June 2005 draft, 18 foreign-born players (including overall top draft choice Andrew Bogut of Australia) were selected, compared with 10 in 1999 and 4 in 1994. The foreign invasion, naturally, has its critics, from those who moan about the NBA’s eagerness to exploit overseas markets to those who say it is part of a "pearl drops" strategy to whiten a league whose players are mostly black — and whose fans and corporate sponsors are mostly white. But such arguments ring hollow every time the foreigners prove that they’ve got game. Foreign-born players now make up some 15 percent of the NBA’s starting lineups, and they are virtually colonizing the All-Star Game. If that doesn’t convince, just look how badly the American team got spanked at the Athens Olympics last year. It was the gold medal-winning Argentines’ turn to sign the autographs.