How Warriors rose to top in China
“The Chinese really tend to follow the leaders, they go for the stars.”
Stephen Curry heard the chant come down from the rafters: “KO-BE! KO-BE! KOBE!” There on the big screen overhead was Kobe Bryant, out with an injury, wearing a suit on the Lakers’ bench.
It was a preseason game in October 2013, and Curry was just beginning to become a household name stateside. As he watched adoring fans in Beijing serenade Bryant for simply sitting, Curry wondered: Could he become as popular as Bryant in China someday? That day has come. Four years after they were
essentially guests on Bryant’s tour, Curry and the Warriors return to China this week as the main attraction. They will play exhibition games against Minnesota in Shenzhen and Shanghai. Throngs of fans, security details and crowd barricades await the Far East’s new favorite franchise.
“We want to be China’s team in the NBA,” Warriors President Rick Welts said. “We think we have all of the right factors in play.”
It is a goal that has been nearly a decade in the making for the defending NBA champions. Golden State first played in China in 2008. When Joe Lacob and his investment group bought the Warriors in 2010 for $450 million, they made a point to honor the Bay Area’s large Chinese American population.
Golden State began celebrating Chinese New Year and hosting Asian Heritage Nights. In 2013, it was one of the first NBA teams to start an account on Sina Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging service, and to create a website in simplified Chinese. Their 3.77 million followers on Weibo leads all NBA teams.
Fueled by their winning ways and the popularity of Curry, Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant, three perennial All-Stars who visit China regularly on promotional tours, the Warriors surpassed the Lakers last season for the top-selling team merchandise in the country.
In August, typically their worst month for online traffic, the Warriors easily topped the league with 30 million social engagements in China on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Tickets to Golden State’s games against the Timberwolves sold out within an hour after they went on sale Aug. 18.
“Entering this trip, the brand of the Warriors definitely could not be higher,” said David Shoemaker, NBA China’s CEO. “I expect the reaction of our fans and partners to be as great as we’ve ever seen for a team traveling to China.”
The Chinese have played basketball since the late 1800s. Their national team made its Olympic debut at the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin. Communities in the country and city were designed with basketball courts at their center.
The NBA saw China’s potential at least three decades ago. In 1979, just months after President Jimmy Carter normalized relations with the country after the death of Mao Zedong, the Washington Bullets became the first U.S. professional sports team to visit China. While in Beijing eight years later, NBA commissioner David Stern offered to let China Central Television broadcast games for free.
Yao Ming, the former Rockets center from Shanghai, helped popularize the NBA in the early 2000s. Today, the league is two years into a five-year, $500 million deal that gives Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. exclusive streaming rights to every NBA game.
Because prime-time games in the U.S. tip off in the morning in China, employees often sneak looks at their tablets or smartphones during work. More than 700 million people watched the NBA in China last season.
Thirteen NBA teams have played in the country since 2004, with all 22 games selling out. China opened three NBA academies, basketball training centers for the nation’s top male and female prospects, last year alone. With an estimated 300 million Chinese playing basketball, it is the country’s No. 1 sport.
“The Warriors’ front office is smart to try to capitalize on their current success and work on building an international fan base while securing lucrative, long-term sponsorship deals,” Joris Drayer, a Temple University associate professor of sports and recreation management, said in an email.
“Three or four years from now, if the Warriors aren’t the league leaders, it won’t make them quite as marketable as they are today,” added Eric Harwit, an Asian studies professor at the University of Hawaii who has lived in China or worked as a visiting professor in Beijing almost yearly for about three decades. “The Chinese really tend to follow the leaders, they go for the stars. The Warriors are really riding that wave right now.”
During the Warriors’ visits to Beijing and Shanghai in 2013, they saw firsthand how passionate the Chinese are about the NBA. Thousands of fans, holding signs and camera phones, waited for them in front of the team hotel. One young woman who had taken a six-hour train ride into Beijing shrieked in glee — “Laurence Scott! Laurence Scott!” — when she saw the team employee she had watched in so many online promotional videos.
Several months later, with the help of a translator, Curry did a 45-minute Weibo chat from his hotel room on a regular-season road trip. When the AllStar voting results were released weeks later, he had gone from No. 4 to No. 2 among Western Conference guards.
“The crazy thing is that we were really just trying to make a name for ourselves as an organization at that time,” said Chip Bowers, Golden State’s chief marketing officer. “It just goes to show the power of the NBA fan base in China.”
Perhaps more than supporters in any other NBA market, the Chinese take a personal approach to their fandom. A superstar who visits endears himself to one of the fastest-growing sports markets in the world.
Look no further than Bryant. Every year from 2006 to 2016, he visited China on promotional tours for Nike. His commercials for everything from Smart Car to Sprite to, of course, Nike have been mainstays on Chinese TV.
In 2008, during the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, Bryant starred in a six-episode reality show in China called “Kobe Mentu,” or “Kobe’s Disciples.” A year later, Bryant created the Kobe Bryant China Fund and donated roughly $700,000 to relief efforts after an earthquake in Sichuan province killed more than 87,000 people.
It all set a blueprint for the next generation of NBA superstars, including Curry and Thompson, to capitalize on the basketball-crazed Chinese market.
In 2014, Thompson signed with Chinese sportswear brand Anta to gain a foothold in China. Now, after two NBA titles and three All-Star appearances in three years, he is fresh off signing a 10-year, $80 million extension with the company. A failed 360-degree dunk attempt during his tour of China in June, which found a huge online audience in China and the U.S., only helped Thompson become more popular in the Far East.
“That really endeared Klay to the Chinese fan base,” Shoemaker, of NBA China, said. “Folks out here love when you’re able to have a good time and laugh at yourself.”
Meanwhile, Curry has visited the country with Under Armour each of the past four years. He’s put on basketball clinics, tried tai chi, signed autographs — anything to connect with his Chinese fans. In April, news surfaced that Curry had dethroned the retired Bryant for China’s best-selling NBA jersey.
Several of the Warriors’ younger players have asked Curry recently what they should expect in China.
His advice: Be prepared for craziness. In the summer of 2015, after touching down in the country, Curry was greeted at his hotel by a swarm of fans behind barricades. There in the front was a huge cutout photo of his then-3year-old daughter Riley’s face.
“When something like that happens there, I don’t think there’s anything creepy about it,” Curry said. “They’re just trying to get as attached as they can to their favorite players.”
“We want to be China’s team in the NBA. We think we have all of the right factors in play.” Rick Welts, Golden State Warriors president