The NBA's Play for India

Having won over China, the league eyes a huge, cricket-mad country with little hoops history

NBA Commissioner David Stern has already executed a beautiful pivot move into China, where, thanks in part to Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, hoops is hotter than Sichuan cooking. There's still work to be done in Europe, even though it is now a source of many NBA players, including seven Frenchmen and six Slovenes. Before the season, the Philadelphia 76ers and Phoenix Suns played exhibition games in Germany, a challenging NBA country, as part of a four-team, five-country full-court press of Europe--Italy, Spain, France and Russia were also hosts of training camps and games.

But there's a new frontier that the...

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