Last week, two of the worst teams in the NBA’s Eastern Conference travelled over 4,000 miles across the pond to do battle at the O2 Arena: The New York Knicks and the Washington Wizards.
The NBA started introducing regular season games in London back in March 2011 when the New Jersey Nets and Toronto Raptors faced off.
Since then, there has been 8 games held in London with these match-ups filled with some of the sport’s biggest stars, such as Carmelo Anthony, Paul George and Kyrie Irving in an attempt to increase the popularity of the NBA in England.
These players all aspired to compete in the Play-offs months later for a chance at winning the NBA Championship.
All three players have a massive following across the world (millions of followers on multiple social media accounts) and have their own personal basketball shoe sponsorship deals as a result of their popularity.
However, the most well-known player who played in 2018-19 NBA London Game was Bradley Beal, who has been an all-star, but pails in comparison in both popularity and fame to players who competed in the previous NBA London Games.
So, it begs the question: why did the NBA send teams, who have not won an NBA Championship since the 1970’s, to London under the premise of generating more popularity for their sport in Europe?
NFL Over NBA
When it comes to the NFL, a lot more thought is seemed to be taken when choosing what teams are playing. This season, the 2018 Super Bowl winners Philadelphia Eagles were one of the teams selected to play at Wembley Stadium, a clear sign of the NFL sending one of their best teams, a concept the NBA failed to register for this season’s global game.
But when it comes to watching the NBA in the UK, there is also no doubt that there is a large following of passionate viewers.
In the summer of 2018, BT Sport announced that they were losing the broadcast rights of the NBA heading into the 2018-19 season, which drew the ire of many of the public who had been regular viewers of the sport and had many wondering how they were going to be able to watch the sport.
Thankfully for UK fans, two days before the regular season started, Sky Sports announced a new four-year-deal partnership with the NBA.
Growing Game
The UK are starting to acknowledge basketball more and more every year. Before last year’s match-up in London between the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers, the NBA and Basketball England announced plans to increase participation for 11-13-year-old boys and girls.
They aimed to get 22,000 children involved to take up the sport but are getting very little help from the British government, most likely due to startling numbers of sport participation in the UK.
Per Sport England, over a million 14- to 25-year-old’s play football at least once a week and over 170,000 play basketball once a week.
For years, the NBA have stated that the UK and European audience is growing year after year, but if the quality of teams that make the travel to London trends in the direction that we saw in 2019, will that still be the case?
