Basketball without Borders: Why the NBA Is About to Take Over the Country and the World

In an increasingly urban world, the NBA is an urban sport — married to urban culture and playable in city parks around the globe. In its cultural chic, its demographics, its speed, its compactness and its drama, the NBA looks and feels like a contemporary game.

As in so many things, the virtues of major league sports can sometimes be vices. The marriage between the NBA and urban culture almost killed pro basketball in America in the early 2000s as viewers turned away from the Iverson-branded, Hip-Hop-aligned NBA in a post Jordan era. But now hip-hop is the most listened to music in the world, according to Spotify. And what was a questionable marriage a decade ago now looks like pure genius.

Iverson is adored and in the hall of fame. Basketball has a World Cup. Things are looking good for the NBA’s business prospects.

Compare that scenario to both baseball and football, where we see again how virtues are not always just clear-cut benefits.

The NFL is America’s top sports league in part because it is so purely American. Despite playing some games in London, the NFL is permanently tied to celebratory jingoism. The American flag is on the NFL emblem.

Such a strong patriotic affiliation has been great at home, but seems to set a market boundary for the league in ways that will be hard to overcome. Who else wants gridiron if the message of the sport is that it is only for us?

Also, one of the appeals of football and baseball as sports is the pastoral qualities of the game. Played on open green fields, you can really say you are going out to the park to watch a football game or a baseball game. For the most part, this is a beneficial aspect of the sport and one that even makes television viewing truly pleasant sometimes.

The downside to these wide open spaces is in the need for acreage to house the stadiums. This is especially true for football with NFL stadiums, which can generally hold around 70,000 fans and tend to be built on the edge of urban areas due to size constraints. The New York Jets don’t even play in New York…

NBA stadiums average capacities in the 20,000 range, which means that a stadium can be fit inside the city — the Staples Center in Los Angeles and the United Center in Chicago and even the larger Madison Square Garden in New York.

As for baseball, the pastoral qualities of not just the playing field but the game itself have been remarked on for decades. It’s a throwback game. Part of the appeal is the lack of a game clock. These things certainly work in the sport’s favor, but they also work against it, making MLB baseball into something of an anachronism for years. Now the MLB is resurgent. Why? The figured out how to make the game feel faster on television through a sophisticated and well-devised bombardment of statistics, graphs and other on-screen technologies.

In short, the MLB found a way to update the viewing experience while leaving the game alone. It’s an astounding feat, really, and no doubt all sports fans applaud the MLB’s savvy.

The Global Brand

Looking at the big picture, however, the MLB seems to be in the same bind as the NFL. These sports are largely bounded by national borders. Baseball is no longer an Olympic sport and football will almost certainly never be played internationally.

The United States is a big market — the biggest national market on the planet. There is room to grow here and money to be made. But there is a bigger market out there — the global market — and the NBA is poised to take full advantage.

Already the most internationally diverse in terms of its team demographics, the NBA is part of a sport where international competition has been heating up since the Olympic Dream Team showcase in 1992.

In the intervening years the sport has solidified its place as one of the highlights of the summer Olympics, with competition becoming increasingly even as countries like France, Australia, Argentina, Spain and Serbia have all fielded very strong medal winning teams.

Basketball, like hip-hop music and sneaker culture, is a game without borders.