Continuing on with the success seen in previous visits to London, United Kingdom, in its NBA Live series of exhibition matches, the NBA will next year feature official regular season games in the 2012 Olympic venue.
Basketball has been a quickly growing sport in the UK in recent years, as a perfect storm of factors have colluded to ensure that the public begins to grasp onto it as a recognised sport. Of course, football will always be THE sport in the Mother Country, but sports such as basketball can attempt to get some foothold as a peripheral concern.
The presence of UK-bred NBA players such as Luol Deng, Ben Gordon and Pops Mensah-Bonsu, as well as the continued support and development work provided by former NBA player John Amaechi have combined with the upcoming 2012 Olympics in London to mean that basketball is growing in leaps and bounds in the Britain. The national program has made concerted efforts to improve itself by bringing in the likes of Deng and Gordon to the squad, as they strive to be a semi-competitive in a tough European region, as they prepare for the 2012 Games as a landmark goal.
The NBA has been hosted by London’s O2 Arena for some years now, with various NBA teams arriving for exhibition matches, generally around October — just before the NBA regular season start. The same will happen this year, as the champion Los Angeles Lakers and the lowly Minnesota Timberwolves will square off.
Obviously the presence of superstars in exhibition matches can sometimes be doubtful, unless heavily pushed by the NBA’s PR department. This is not to say that the big guns don’t turn up — such as in 2007 when contentiously Boston’s “Big Three” got together to play against Kevin Garnett‘s TWolves, immediately after he had been traded. However by their very nature, exhibition games often mean that players will rest up injuries and spend valuable time with family.
Not so when it comes to regular season games. That is why it is a much lauded announcement by the NBA that the New Jersey Nets and Toronto Raptors will match up for two regular season games in London on March 4 and 5, 2011. Stern has been alluding to this as a possibility for some time, as he continues to build the NBA brand in Europe and in particular in the UK. It follows the same move by the NFL to serve up a diehard base of European NFL fans with some regular season action.
The O2 Arena, the same venue that will host the finals of the 2012 Olympics basketball competition, will see the youth of the Nets taking on the heavily European-influenced Raptors lineup. This is not a matchup of heavyweights by any means, but will undoubtedly provide the London crowd with a fairly even pairing over the back-to-back games.
The beat rolls on for development of basketball in Britain.
