A little NBA Draft Day math
Tonight 30 NBA teams will select 60 players to join their ranks. It'll be televised in 115 countries in 18 languages, and some of the newest NBA ballers will be foreign themselves. It all adds up to some nice global padding on the bottom line, Jill Barshay reports.
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Lisa Napoli: Lots of very tall people will gather tonight at Madison Square Garden. It’s that time of year, for the NBA draft. Some regular-sized people will be around, too: An unprecedented number of foreign journalists will document it all. From New York, Jill Barshay looks at what the paparazzi means for the basketball business.
Jill Barshay: Not one, but two Chinese television stations are planning to broadcast the NBA Draft live. Millions of Chinese are expected to tune in to see which American team snags their new star, Yi Jianlian.
Kerry Slatkoff handles corporate sponsorships at Ketchum Sports Network. She says it’s no coincidence the NBA has found seven foreign players who might make the first-round draft.
Kerry Slatkoff: They’ve long recruited in those countries, sure to make the quality of the game better, but it’s definitely got a bottom-line impact on their business.
The NBA signed a deal yesterday for just the U.S. TV rights that could be worth more than $1 billion a year. Foreign TV rights won’t be quite the same slam dunk, but NBA commissioner David Stern hopes they will soon amount to half of those domestic numbers.
Tonight’s NBA Draft will be televised in 115 countries in 18 languages.
In New York, I’m Jill Barshay for Marketplace.