NBA: Why are Jeremy Sochan and OG Anunoby only current players with British links?

Despite the lack of British stars in the NBA, the league generates a large British-based audience.

In Europe, Great Britain has the second largest number of NBA League Pass subscriptions, only behind Germany.

The NBA app also had an average weekly viewer increase of 52% in 2023-24 compared to the previous season from British-based fans.

Between 2013 and 2019, London’s O2 Arena hosted yearly regular-season NBA matches. Since then, Paris has been the preferred European destination for global matches.

In terms of basketball participation across Great Britain, a study from Statista found that in 2023, 344,400 people in the United Kingdom were playing basketball twice a month, a growth of almost 50% since 2021.

Although interest in the NBA is higher and participation levels are on the up, funding and the rate of which top-level British players are being developed into the NBA are low.

Including America, 20 countries have three or more players currently contracted by NBA sides. European counterparts Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Serbia, Turkey and Ukraine are all among those.

Internationally, Great Britain are ranked 50th in Fiba’s rankings, below Cape Verde, Iceland and Estonia.

The British Basketball League, which had served as Britain’s premier basketball division since 1987, folded earlier this year and was replaced by Super League Basketball – whose maiden season started last month.

Of the £245.8m invested by UK Sport before the 2024 Olympics in Paris, just £1.35m went to basketball. Of the 33 sports invested in, only eight had lower funding.

For the first time, Great Britain opted to not enter qualification for this year’s Olympics. Great Britain have also failed to qualify for any of the last four Fiba World Cups.