Coral Lu speaking with Blazers guard Damian Lillard, her favorite NBA player to interview (Corallulu/Instagram).

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From David Stern’s visits to China in the ’80s to every NBA Finals game being broadcast there live in 1994 to Yao Ming’s thrilling rookie season with the Rockets in 2002 to LinSanity 10 years later to the explosion of social media and the league’s recent rights deals (worth hundreds of millions of dollars) with Chinese tech giants, the NBA’s influence in China has skyrocketed. The one and only Coral Lu of ESPN China brings her unique perspective to help break it all down for us.

Here are some highlights (*Due to dynamic advertising, time stamps may vary per listener):

13:39-14:12: “I would say 90 percent or at least 85 percent of NBA fans from China are aged from 16 to 35 or late 30s, so that’s a really specific demographic. A lot of older Chinese people, they might like soccer, but they did not watch basketball [growing up]. But all the younger generation or the people around my age, we all kind of grew up with basketball, so it becomes part of our daily life.”

19:11-19:50: “I think it [Jeremy Lin’s massive popularity in China] is more about his story. So, Jeremy, we all know he is an underdog. We all know that he got cut by the Warriors, got waived by other teams, then you know he finally landed with the Knicks; he was about to get cut again. But he was coming from nowhere. An Asian kid, really, nobody knew him, and he was able to play at Madison Square [Garden], playing super-well, so that’s kind of leading to another hero type. The Chinese people, Chinese fans, they like underdogs. So, if you took a look right now, Steph Curry, he was an underdog too.”

31:10-31:31: “All those [NBA] superstars, they all have Chinese Weibo. Steph Curry is very active on his social media. Sometimes he will even interact with some Chinese celebrity who follows him. Also, LeBron James, Chris Paul, James Harden, Damian Lillard, all of them, they all have Chinese social media.”

35:43-37:28: “We actually have a lot of talented basketball players, but they haven’t been discovered yet. Because it’s not like in the United States…So if you are really killing [it] or becoming a baller in middle school, then people start to recognize you [and] then they will keep following you in high school. Then, you go to an NCAA Division I school [and] you play for like Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, those great universities [and] then eventually you get drafted…Although a lot of people say, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of problems with NCAA athletes too,’ if you take a look, I think it’s already really nice, because each kid, each talented basketball player, they got that opportunity to show their talent in public. But in China, it’s not [like that]… You’re basically picking a bunch of kids who got permission from their parents, that are allowed to play basketball – that’s probably only five or six percent of those people. Then, you’re picking the talented players from that small pool, which is really difficult.”

38:19- 39:36: “Stephon Marbury is a phenomenon in China. You’re not going to see [players like] him all the time. I think it’s going to be really rare. Not because there aren’t a lot of good basketball players playing in China; yes, there are… The rare thing for Stephon Marbury was that he was able to bring a championship to a team that everybody didn’t think was good. And he did not only bring one, he brought three. He brought a championship to the capital city of China [when] everybody thought, ‘That team sucks’ …It’s also kind of like the underdog story…That’s why all the capital people, they love him so much. That’s why they built a statue. Yao Ming did not get a statue, but he got one.”

Listeners can also follow Coral’s work on Instagram.

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Music: “Who Likes to Party” by Kevin MacLeod.