NBA Commissioner David Stern, looking to make inroads into the burgeoning sports and entertainment market in China, said on Tuesday that the first step to success may be to run a league on the mainland.

"What the NBA has to offer is its expertise and reputation as understanding the game, the rules, the facilities - all things about it - and that's a good name," he told Reuters in an interview. "And it doesn't necessarily have to result in an NBA colonization of the basketball world but rather an NBA assistance of the basketball world, using the NBA name and expertise.

Stern added that this did not necessarily mean having to come under the dominion of the NBA behemoth. Stern views the Chinese league as having American players filling many of the roster spots.

"That's what happens now," he said. "Every team there has one or two American players. American players have been playing in Europe and around the world. And so as the free movement of labor intensifies, the answer is that the best will play."

Stern has taken heat for changing the NBA game ball this year from leather to a composite, for the first time in 35 years. The commissioner's most vocal critic has been future Hall of Famer Shaquille O'Neal, who fumed: "Whoever did that needs to be fired. It was terrible, a terrible decision. Awful."

"Shaq is Shaq. I love him," Stern said when told of the comments by the loquacious Miami Heat center.

"For the most part I would say the most valid observation about the ball is that it's different," Stern said. "We think it has a better grip. Our tests do not support the proposition that it's different when it's wet than the leather ball is. We went back to some of the Adidas comments when the new soccer ball was put in, in 2005 prior to the Olympics. It was widely criticized and trashed by the players. By the time of the World Cup it was OK."

"But we're quite concerned. So every time a player says something he gets a call. We ask him what it was and we run it by (ball maker) Spalding... How stupid would we be if we brought in an inferior product at the heart of our game?"

To make his point, Stern pointed out that "scoring is up, shooting percentage is up, and turnovers off the dribble are down."

The NBA chief was excited when discussing the quality of the basketball tournament at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

"In Beijing, the French team is going to have seven NBA players," he said. "That's what's done in football. Ronaldinho goes home to play for his country. That's what will happen here. Our guys are going to go home and they're going to play for their countries."

Stern sees the Beijing Olympics as potentially wielding an impact on global basketball similar to that of the he 1992 gold medal-winning US "Dream Team."

"It's going to be an awesome tournament. Beijing is going to be to the globalization game what the (Michael Jordan-led) Dream Team was to the beginning of globalization (of basketball)."

(Shanghai Daily November 30, 2006)