Great Britons: NBA’s British Ballers Trying to Impress in Time for London 2012

October 18th, 2010 by Michael Botsford Leave a reply »
As you may, or may not know, basketball is not the most popular sport in Great Britain. Sports channels prefer to show soccer (although it’s called football), rugby and cricket and very rarely basketball.

But, excitingly, the interest in basketball is growing. Through ESPN, games are shown live, and teams have visited for several years now, promoting the game. For the first time this year, two regular season NBA games will be played in London, as the Toronto Raptors and the New Jersey Nets will face each other at the O2 Arena in London in March 2011.

Accompanying the British interest in American basketball are some talented players. Under the FIBA rules, the host Olympic nation doesn’t automatically qualify for the basketball tournament, meaning GB still needs to qualify. Signs are good so far, as GB topped their qualifying group in Eurobasket 2011, and the team has an enthusiastic support group, encouraging fans to back British basketball, stating “Deng is better than Lebron." League basketball in Britain is growing steadily, but it's still beneficial to England if some of their top players can play in the best league in the world: the NBA ...

Read Full Article at Bleacher Report - NBA
Article written by

Advertisement

Comments are closed.