By Amy Tennery, Vincent Daheron and Lori Ewing
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A potential European league could be a goldmine for the NBA as the top-flight North American league looks to muscle its way into a deep pool of talent across the Atlantic.
The NBA is exploring the launch of a European league with world basketball governing body FIBA as a partner, Commissioner Adam Silver said last week, with an eye towards a 16-team format made up of 12 permanent clubs and four qualifiers.
The continent’s longstanding Euroleague quickly signalled its readiness to enter into talks with the NBA, even as it has balked at the idea of another league in the region.
“They understood perfectly that NBA became global, the last MVPs are almost all international players. They see that the talents come mainly from Europe,” said Olivier Mazet, an agent to players in the NBA and Europe.
“There is a will to take the field, to ensure the storytelling from the emergence of talent in Europe to their arrival in the NBA.”
A joint-record 125 international players from 43 countries were named to NBA teams at the start of the 2024-25 season, with all 30 franchises featuring at least one player born outside the United States.
With the global pool of talent growing in the North American-invented sport, the NBA follows a similar playbook to the other “Big Four” men’s U.S. sports leagues which are looking to stamp out their territory abroad.
The National Football League has rapidly expanded the number of international games, with a Christmas Day Netflix streaming slate boosting its global ambitions, while Major League Baseball kicked off this season in Japan at the Tokyo Dome.
“It’s another example of Adam Silver’s vision and leadership in conceptualizing a way to internationalize the NBA,” said Leigh Steinberg, an American sports agent best known as the inspiration for the movie character “Jerry Maguire”.
“One of the keys is the fact that the most popular American sport which is the NFL is not played in other countries where basketball is.”
‘GROWN SIGNIFICANTLY’
Steinberg said he believed there was a possibility for the NBA and Euroleague to coexist, pointing to the NFL and its neighbor to the north, the Canadian Football League, as proof.
The Euroleague is celebrating its 25th season with a cult-like following and attendances have been steadily on the rise, more than 3 million spectators going to games last season and average attendances rising 18%.
“European basketball does not need to be saved,” Euroleague Basketball CEO Paulius Motiejunas said via email.
“If NBA and FIBA truly care about its growth and about the fans, their focus should be on contributing to its progress, not on creating a new league that fragments, divides and confuses fans,” Motiejunas added.
“We have consistently extended an open invitation for dialogue with any organization interested in supporting the growth of European basketball. That applies to the NBA, FIBA and any other organizations.
“But creating a new league does not go in that direction.”
Fenerbahce General Manager Maurizio Gherardini said the enduring devotion of the fans had been critical to success.
“All the parameters of the Euroleague keep growing, in terms of fans, attendance, social media interaction, sponsors, interest. And it’s not a coincidence,” said Gherardini, a former VP and assistant general manager of the NBA’s Toronto Raptors.
“That being said, I think we can do better, maybe with somebody else’s contribution or guidance. But what you breathe inside some of the arenas in Europe is something that you cannot find anywhere else in the basketball world in terms of that sort of atmosphere.”
Player-turned-agent Pete Mickeal said a future NBA Europe could help open players’ eyes to possibilities abroad.
The former second-round pick in the NBA Draft spent years chasing the dream of playing in the top-flight North American league after injuries thwarted his chances in the early years of his career.
“Back then it was ‘NBA or you’re a bust’. That was the mentality,” said Mickeal, who heads his Mickeal Sports Group agency. “Now, the mentality is totally different… and the conditions overseas have dramatically improved.”
He never got to play a game in the NBA and in 2009 signed for Barcelona, where he won the EuroLeague championship a year later and basked in the support of the club’s legions of fans.
“Of course, I wanted to make it to the NBA but since that never happened, I never dwelled on it,” Mickeal said. “And I think I got the best result I could have gotten out of my career.”
(Reporting by Amy Tennery, Vincent Daheron and Lori Ewing, Editing by Ed Osmond)
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