LOS ANGELES: NBA commissioner Adam Silver has expressed the hope that India could host an NBA pre-season match in “the next few years”.
Silver made his comments at a press conference here Saturday prior to the 67th NBA All-Star game in which Team LeBron overcame Team Steph 148-145.
On the possibility of an NBA pre-season game in India, Silver said: “One of the things we’re looking at, which we hope to do relatively soon, is bring a pre-season game to India. A little is dependent on the arena infrastructure, but we’ve heard some good news from the market in terms of Delhi and Mumbai about plans of new arenas. So that’s something I’ve we’re hopeful to do.
“Back to my friend Vivek Ranadive, the principal governor of the Sacramento Kings, and he was born in Mumbai. In addition to constantly reminding me about getting an All-Star Game in Sacramento, he says, ‘We really want to play in India’. So it’s something that I have a feeling we’ll get done in the next few years.”
When the standard clichéd interview question was thrown as to whether Silver felt confident that India would get its first proper NBA star in a few years, the league commissioner offered a larger picture perspective: “I don’t want to make predictions in terms of when exactly an Indian player will come into the league, but I know there is no magic around it. It’s the result of, as I said earlier, about our junior programs, it’s about hard work, it’s about discipline. It’s about appropriate training techniques. It’s about passion.
“And one of the things we’re learning around the world is there is an enormous amount of basketball being played, even in India. It’s such a large country, obviously, over a billion people, that there is a significant amount of basketball being played.
“But unless at a young age you have access to proper training, proper facilities, have access to competition so you can size yourself up against other great players and have a sense of what’s needed in order to improve your game, that we won’t produce Indian players just leaving things the way they are.
“So we made a decision that it’s worth the investment for the league to have an academy in India, to take the existing infrastructure with the Indian basketball association (Basketball Federation of India), with FIBA, of young people who are playing the game, trying to bring them together, bring over coaches from the NBA, other retired players who have a fascination in some cases with the Indian market and some who just want to help train and develop players and work together in the communities there.
“We have an excellent relationship with the Reliance Foundation and with other corporate partners in India.”
For the record, the NBA opened an elite basketball training center – NBA Academy India – at the Jaypee Greens Integrated Sports Complex in Greater Noida in May last year.
The NBA had also tied up with Reliance Foundation for its junior NBA program which has already reached more than 6 million youth and trained more than 5,000 physical education instructors nationwide since its launch in 2013.
