Ahead Hooped Up and Ready to Go

Indiana Pacers vs Sacramento Kings in Mumbai, 2019. Courtesy: NBA India

Hooped Up and Ready to Go!

WORDS BY SHRIYA GHATE

Unless 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 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 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

only grown and this is demonstrated in the many professional tournaments, including the UBA Pro Basketball League, that have been taking place. The game really picked up momentum in the last ten years with the NBA increasing its presence in India with the NBA/ WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Association) Hoop School Programme in 2008 and setting up more than 12 basketball training centres in Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and many more locations. 35 of its players have visited the country since 2006. Not only that, India saw it’s first professional NBA match take place in the NSCI Dome in Mumbai as recently as October, 2019. Despite all of this development, basketball is still massively overshadowed by cricket and even local games like kabaddi. What then, is the reason for the NBA’s continued effort in India? NBA Deputy Commissioner, Mark Tatum, likens the Indian sports market to that of China 20 years ago. “Today in China basketball is the number one sport,” says Tatum, who started promoting the game in China two decades ago. “300 million people play the game of basketball in China. It is very reminiscent of the early days of the NBA in China. And I think that basketball has the same potential here in India.” One of the reasons for the NBA’s popularity in China is also the player Yao Ming, who played with the team Houston Rockets for nine years. India is yet to have its first all-star NBA player. The hope for the NBA is that in the next five to ten years India will be able to produce such a player. This is the reason behind launching the Reliance Foundation Jr NBA Programme, which has been running since 2013 and has trained over 11 million children in the last seven years. So where does this leave Dream11 and NBA, who have once again extended their contract for fantasy basketball in India? The numbers seem encouraging as far as digital and TV viewership is concerned. The Sony Group of channels reported viewership to be 91 million for NBA games in 2018-19. There is no reason why the fantasy version of the game will not follow. “We have seen a significant increase in fan engagement since the launch of the NBA’s fantasy platform on Dream11 three years ago,” says Siddharth Chury, AVP Global Partnerships for NBA India. It looks like it’s only a matter of time before the game explodes on our mobile screens.