The National Basketball Association, or NBA as it is popularly known, on Thursday pipped the more fancied football leagues such as the English Premier League or the Spanish League to announce pre-season friendlies in India.
Individual promoters have been announcing many friendlies between former stars of many such football clubs in the last few years only to backtrack later for want of enough sponsorship and financial support.
In 2011, Blackburn Rovers became the only top flight club to play an exhibition game in India but that was only because they had an Pune-based Indian owner in poultry business conglomerate Venky’s.
Mind you, holding a pre-season friendly outside the geographical jurisdiction of the league is not just aimed at expanding the fan base but has to also be a revenue generating trip and no league or club would commit to an overseas pre-season games unless both objectives are met.
NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum said as much during the announcement of the two games between Indiana Pacers and Sacramento Kings. “We make sure we have enough fans, when the time is right to bring the NBA game here, where the fans will be excited about. That the tickets will sell out and that there would be enough interest around these games.”
It hasn’t been an overnight process that has led to growing interest in a game that is definitely not high on the radar of the Indian sports fan. The early morning timings of the NBA games on Indian television aren’t really ideal for exponential growth in viewership.
“NBA has been making sure that we are making these investments. For the last seven years we have been investing. We have been investing in grassroots development programs where we have reached 10 million boys and girls. We have trained 10000 physical education teachers on how to run basketball practices and how to train kids.
“Our viewership was now 120 million last year, 1.4 billion impressions on Facebook. Now we see there is a demand for NBA basketball,” said Tatum.
Though the NBA officially established their India office only in 2011, they began working on the Indian market back in 2006 and since then more than 35 current and former NBA and WNBA players visited India to conduct clinics for coaches and young kids.
The real game changer, however, for NBA has been their junior NBA program launched in 2013 in collaboration with Reliance Foundation that runs for three months and apart from conducting competitions, trains the players and physical education teachers of participating teams for free.
“It is the biggest school program in the country and the growth has been exponential,” NBA India Managing Director Yannick Colaco said, adding it has expanded from 235 schools and 142,000 kids in 2013-14 to 6142 schools and 4.9mn children in 2017-18. This year the program aims to reach 6000 schools and 6.5mn students.
In 2017, they also launched NBA basketball schools and now have 26 centres where children can train after school. “It is a tuition fee based program but we give a lot of scholarships too. It is run with our partners India on Track but the entire program has been designed by NBA,” Colaco added.
But the flagship project that NBA is banking on to produce a star basketball player from India is the NBA Academy in Noida where they are training about 24 kids. One of them, Princepal Singh, has already moved to the NBA Global Academy in Canberra, Australia, and recently made his India senior team debut at the age of 17.
“The way it is set up right now it can take 24 kids, that’s the optimum capacity with the facilities we have. We are in the second year and after two years we will have to take a step back and see where we have been. Do we expand the capacity of this academy or set up another academy,” Colaco said, adding they have tried to democratise the process of trials as far as possible by allowing kids to even send their entries by showcasing their skills on social media platforms.
“There is only so much scouting you can do. In fact, among the 45 kids selected for the national finals, seven came through social media and one of them is now in the academy,” he added.
But how difficult is it going to be to get the sort of commercial success that NBA is looking for with no Indian role models to follow in the league.
Colaco believes that the way sport is followed around the world now, most kids aspire to play in the top leagues and idolise global stars and banks on the fact that one of the academy products may one day go on to play in the NBA.
As things stand now, Satnam Singh was drafted by Dallas Mavericks in 2015 but did not get a game while Sim Bhullar became the first Indian origin player to actually play in an NBA game. Amjyot Singh is also currently playing in the G-League.
However, one cannot deny the fact that NBA graph went up exponentially in China when Yao Ming arrived on the horizon and became a household star.
Tatum explains that it wasn’t an overnight process and NBA had been investing in China for long to find one Yao Ming.
“That’s the thing about Yao Ming. When Yao Ming came, we took off. But we were in China 20 years before Yao Ming showed up.
“I don’t think it will take 20 years here. But we understand that it doesn’t happen over night. I would say that we are seeing progress. It takes time. It takes time to get kids to that level. But we see that the talent is there. And just in a year and half, we have been investing in the academy, we can see tangible growth in the skills of the players,” he added.
The decision to hold two pre-season games in Mumbai also proves that brand NBA has not just found it’s feet in the Indian market in the last decade or so but is now ready to take flight. And credit needs to go to NBA India’s slow and steady build up approach with a focus on grassroot development apart from the right marketing strategies.