Basketball in India

Last year, the NBA held its inaugural “Basketball Without Borders” event in India. Ronny Turiaf and Kyle Korver found that basketball courts are sparse, and confirmed that cricket is the country’s first love. Still, India remains a potentially lucrative market for the NBA. Ryne Nelson at SLAM caught up with Karan Madhok, a former journalist for The Times of India newspaper, for a report on the state of basketball in the world’s second-most populous country.

Aleksander Bucan, a Serbian, has been leading the Indian team for the past two years, following 14 years of experience with coaching positions in national and professional squads in Serbia and Yugoslavia. He believes that although the youth of the nation show ample interest in the NBA and basketball, there are a host of other problems hampering the game’s growth.

“I don’t want to say much about the deficiencies in the conditions, because there is nothing really that I can do about it,” Bucan says. “It could be up to another 15-20 more years before we can say that the facilities are up to the desired standard. But there are others countries which have been able to produce great global teams and stars without world-class infrastructure, and we should be able to do the same.”

The troubles, as anyone affiliated with any sport in India will tell you, are with the system itself. Unlike other countries, India does not have a league system for most sports. Most of the top-level basketball players in India have other full-time jobs or work with services for the government, such as Railways or the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation. Due to this, even the brightest stars of the national team are but semi-professionals. These players only play in sporadically scheduled cups and tournaments, and their lack of day-in, day-out basketball experience then exposes their talent level when the team faces better-prepared international rivals.

And unlike other countries, any sport not named “cricket” isn’t exactly a lucrative career choice for young Indians. The Indian system lacks the honest interest that its neighbor and competitor China has shown in developing a world-class sports faculty. Most of those who take sport seriously past their school days are either rich enough to take such a risk or poor enough to not have any other option. The middle class is more likely to become doctors or businessmen or software engineers or take up other “safer” careers.