Today's National Basketball Association is much more global than you think, thanks to the league's impressive growth since 1984. The rosters of the 10 teams that played Monday's quintuple-header included 38 international players from 24 countries, with Australia, Canada and France most represented (four men each). Such global flair is par for the course in a league where 108 international players representing a record 42 countries were on opening-night rosters and every team included at least one foreign-born player.
 

This year's NBA Christmas Day marquee, a tradition that dates to 1947, showcased some of the season's hottest teams and attracted millions of views in the United States and around the world. But it's not just the high-quality game and players' pizazz that unite and excite people from Chicago to Cairo, Paris to the Philippines and beyond. For many outside North America, they're also cheering on their own.

Basketball's success stemmed from its ease of play and perception as a healthy, nonviolent activity, but the two world wars boosted its popularity as the sport mixed people, culture and ideas. The YMCA and American Red Cross organized basketball games for off-duty and convalescing troops during World War I, an activity enthusiastically taken up by men of various nationalities who separated the sport from its Protestant YMCA-affiliated roots.

Hoops-swishing U.S. doughboys, with their aura of youth, strength and energy, conferred new degrees of modernity to the game and aided its implementation in Central and Eastern Europe, as did émigrés returning home. Basketball became the de facto national sport in China by the 1930s, while Chinese coaches further diffused the game as they trained and drilled teams in neighboring countries such as Cambodia. The liberation of occupied Europe, Africa and Asia by the Allies in 1944-1945 only reinforced basketball's "cool" image, although in most of the world it lacked the widespread popularity and commercial appeal of soccer (football).

In the mid-1940s, efforts to jump-start a professional basketball league in the United States benefited from two trends: the country's wartime enthusiasm for the sport and the need to fill often-vacant stadiums. When the organization that eventually became the NBA formed in 1946, scouts, coaches and owners were focused on solvency and survival, not on sourcing top talent from an ever-expanding overseas pool of players. Still, early league rosters weren't entirely devoid of international representation. The first foreign-born NBA player was Henry Biasatti in 1946, and in the 1950s the nascent league drafted its first players from abroad. But the first European-born and -trained player to sport an NBA jersey was France's Hervé Dubuisson, who played for the New Jersey Nets in summer 1984.

The NBA succeeded in monopolizing basketball globally in ways that the YMCA never could, thanks to its marketing of stars, the universality of its up-tempo, athletic game and its inclusion of a labor force that reflects its international fan base. U.S. stalwarts LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant play alongside standouts such as Marc and Pau Gasol, Dirk Nowitzki, Tony Parker and Manu Ginóbili. The success of these players encourages more youths "back home" to emulate their heroes, thus feeding the cycle.

For all of this phenomenal business growth, the NBA's global popularity wouldn't be possible without the longer roots of the game. Because countries such as China, France and others embraced the game shortly after its creation and made it their own, basketball has perhaps not been perceived as an American imperial export in the same way that baseball may be viewed (especially in Latin America, the Caribbean, Japan and the Philippines). Basketball was primed for success in many parts of the world; it just needed heroes, stars and a strong enabler (that is, the NBA) to make it a truly global phenomenon.

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