FA N TA SY S P O R T S
Indiana Pacers vs Sacramento Kings in Mumbai, 2019. Courtesy: NBA India
Hooped Up and Ready to Go! U WORDS BY SHRIYA GHATE
nless you’ve been living under a rock these past two years, you know that Dream11 is a fantasy cricket app. But I wonder if you knew that it is also a fantasy basketball app? For the majority of us living in India, basketball is a sport you might play in school or college and that’s about it. Most of us don’t play it beyond a certain age, we definitely don’t 38
GUTSHOT
MARCH
watch professional games, and knowledge about the key players and teams is not even on the horizon! Yet here is one of India’s biggest fantasy sports apps doing a collaboration with the NBA (National Basketball Association), a body that oversees professional basketball in the US, where it is undoubtedly a well-followed sport. Naturally we were curious and decided to find out more
2021
about this unusual association! Let’s begin by saying that basketball has been in India for the last 90 years at least! In fact, the first Indian Male Championship for basketball was played way back in 1934 in New Delhi and the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) was set up as early as 1950. Between then and now, the appreciation for basketball as a sport has
