We’re watching a recent Rockets game in Houston, Texas.
But look a little closer,
and you might notice something different this season.
Chinese ads everywhere.
This ad is for an online mortgage company in China.
This one is for a Chinese cryptocurrency company.
And this one is for condoms.
Made in Japan, but still big in China and other Asian markets.
The court, the hoop post,
even James Harden’s seat are all covered with Chinese ads.
They’re not really meant for Houstonians,
especially since the city is only about 7% Asian,
and an even smaller percentage is Chinese.
They’re meant for a bigger audience,
thousands of miles away from Texas.
The NBA and China have been courting each other for decades,
starting back in 1979,
when the Washington Bullets traveled to China
for the first-ever NBA exhibition game against a Chinese team.
By the early ‘90s,
the NBA saw the Asia-Pacific region
as its biggest expansion opportunity,
opening its first overseas office in Hong Kong in 1992.
But it wasn’t until this 2002 event,
10 years later, that really catapulted the NBA into China’s sphere.
During Yao’s first game,
more than 200 million people tuned in to watch.
The Rockets, an underdog team
that hadn’t won an NBA final since 1995,
suddenly attracted both U.S. and international viewers.
Yao’s influence went beyond just Houston.
It impacted the entire league.
In 2004, the NBA hosted its first exhibition game in China
between two U.S. teams: the Rockets and Kings.
In 2008,
the year of the Beijing Olympics,
the league launched NBA China.
There are over 300 million amateur basketball players in China,
more than the entire U.S. population.
The rest of the league followed Houston’s lead,
doubling down on its presence in China,
opening training centers, sponsoring international games,
and encouraging its players to tour in China.
The NBA is now the most-followed sports league
on Chinese social media.
And these international eyeballs are worth
big money to the NBA and Chinese advertisers.
Broadcasting rights for NBA games in China
now make up 70 percent of the league’s overseas revenue.
The fandom is so big that Chinese internet giant Tencent
paid $500 million to the NBA
to be its exclusive digital partner in China for five years.
During the 2018 NBA Western Conference finals
between the Golden State Warriors and Rockets,
a record number of people tuned in to watch.
Back in the U.S.,
TNT, the exclusive broadcaster of the same Game 7,
also brought in a record number of viewers, at almost 15 million,
but that was only a quarter of Tencent's reach.
The Houston Rockets are just the
beginning of the NBA’s ventures overseas.
Younger generations who didn’t grow up with Yao Ming
may have different allegiances.
Although Yao has retired from the NBA,
he is still credited as the spark in China’s passion for the league.
Now, there are even more fans devoted to the sport,
tuning in to games and cheering on their favorite teams,
including, of course, the Rockets.
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