Care for a King James cardboard crown with your WonTon soup?

Doug's Take:
A one-hour, prime-time special for a 26-year-old basketball player who’s never won a championship, instigated by “his people” for no other purpose but to announce the colors he’ll wear next season?

Really?

My initial response: the Old Guard NBA retirees should storm ESPN headquarters, forcibly wrest control and beam Bill Russell’s derisively puzzled image saying: “This is what it’s come to?,” followed by 59 minutes and 50 seconds of blank screen and a high-pitched tone.

(Full disclosure/disclaimer—playing hoops at a tiny private institution covered the cost of my college education, so ensuing opinions may be “envy-weighted”)

But wait, let’s remove our high-top Chuck Taylors momentarily (ecck, what’s that smell?) and consider a couple of sobering facts:

• Exhibit A: The U.S. population is roughly 300 million.
• Exhibit B: Some 300 million Chinese play basketball—that’s discounting the assuredly vast masses of non-playing Chinese who are avid fans.
• Exhibit C: Lebron James, with almost certainly six to eight years, (if not a full decade) left in his promising career, is as exciting as any player to walk on an NBA court. Given the right supporting cast, he can take the game to marketing heights the likes of which Jordan, Bird & Magic could have never envisioned.

© iStockphoto/Thinkstock

China—with its runaway middle class, relentless gentrification and urbanism—is what this is really all about.  Yao Ming is big, good and Chinese. But he’s injury prone—and he’s not Lebron. His limited success has only whetted the virtually insatiable “collective” appetite of our friends to the east.

Safe to say, the brand managers handling Brand Lebron slept restlessly last night, if at all--drifting in and out of a fever dream filled with the faint echo of a billion bouncing basketballs, wafting atop the steady “ch-ching” we all know to be international commerce.

(Doug Cook)