Basketball: Keith Duggan, who was in London for the NBA's latest attempt to expand their influence, looks at the implication of the game's global expansion.

When the NBA's barnstorming tour of Europe reached London last Wednesday evening, the only note of discord was reserved for a Chelsea cult hero. Didier Drogba was among the great and the good who sat courtside for the pre-season game between the Boston Celtics and the Minnesota Timberwolves, and when his face was flashed on the gigantic video board that is fixed to the roof of the O2 arena, the crowd booed as though the pantomime villain had just appeared at the circus.

Drogba seemed tickled pink by it all and his apparent unpopularity did not prevent a long line of autograph hunters and phone-camera opportunists from seeking him out, and the Chelsea man was engaging and gracious all evening. And notably, after the game, Drogba was approached by the Celtics' newly acquired superstar, the 7ft Kevin Garnett, who gave the football star a warm hug of recognition.

"We know each other, we met in LA when Chelsea came out to play their pre-season game against the Galaxy," explained Garnett. "And we were talking about trying to find time to meet up, but it is difficult."

Garnett has been a status figure in the NBA for over a decade and is one of the most popular and recognisable players as the league's master strategists try to spread the hoops gospel in the Old World. The idea was to replicate what commissioner David Stern termed "the authentic NBA experience", and the vast 02 Arena provided the perfect theatre. It was a night of sensory overload, with non-stop music and peripheral entertainment and subtle huckstering to complement the basketball. But the abiding message seemed to be that, in terms of elite sport, the world is shrinking.

Just a few years ago it would have seemed disconcerting to hear Boston favourite Paul Pierce answer questions about David Beckham, but the languid Celtics veteran, who last year signed a three-year contract extension worth $59 million, was clearly au fait with Becks.

"Not being a soccer fan, I can definitely say that since David Beckham came to America, he has appealed to people across the way and he has expanded interest in the game. It is a great sport here in England and across Europe, and he has helped it in America. Hopefully, we can do the same here with basketball."

As with football in America, the conversion will be gradual. There has been loose talk of the NBA including a European city in its league for many years. But with over 80 non-American players on contract with NBA clubs, the merits are beginning to look more substantial. Under the commissionership of David Stern, the former attorney who has guided the American professional game out of the relative darkness, it remains a burning ambition. Twenty-five years ago, the NBA finals could not even merit a live broadcast across the US. Now, the NBA is a global attraction.

China has been the most obvious target for the NBA's eastward expansion, with the successful assimilation of Yao Ming as a genuine star in the league strengthening the ties between the two cultures. The attractions are obvious for Stern.

"I was talking with the director of a milk company recently, and he told me: 'We are just a small company. We only provide milk for 400 million people'."

Reminiscing about the NBA's last visit to London, in 1993, Stern joked that the old Wembley arena was perfect apart from the fact that the visitors had to provide "the video, the sound, the floor, the lighting, the seating and some fans".

"And thankfully," he concluded, "they have euthanised that building."

But both the NBA executive and the travelling athletes were wowed by Tony Blair's pet project.

The road show moved from Rome to London, with Stern posing for photographs with city mayor "Red" Ken Livingstone in front of the traditional black cabs bearing NBA slogans. It made for an odd coupling, but Livingstone was highly enthusiastic about the venture, and with London bound to move to the epicentre of sports ahead of the 2012 Olympics, it would seem ripe for a sustained marketing approach from the NBA.

"I said to Doc Rivers, our coach, on the bench: this is the NBA right here," enthused Ray Allen, the silky shooting guard who was recently traded to Boston along with Garnett in the hope of resurrecting a championship tradition that has been latent since 1986.

"You saw the crowd get into doing the waves, the mascots running around, the celebrities on court side. It looked and felt the same as in our cities. It would seem appropriate to have an NBA team in this arena. And I don't know if it is something that is going to happen in my career, but I would relish it if it did."

The 18,000 Arena was officially a sell-out. And although there were clusters of empty seats, the low-lit sheen of the corporate boxes suggested plenty of high-level entertaining going on behind the smoked-glass windows. And the presence of Formula One champion-apparent Lewis Hamilton, along with Drogba, basketball aficionado Anton Ferdinand and a clearly astonished English sitcom name-on-the-tip-of-your-tongue actor did add a "celebrity" dimension to the evening.

At the end of the third quarter the NBA had a parade of legends, and the standing ovation afforded to Bill Russell, one of the genuine gods of the game who won 11 championships in 13 seasons with the Celtics back in the 1960s, was moving.

Silver-bearded and dapper, Russell gave the crowd a brief, courteous wave before being escorted off the court by cheerleaders, and the entertainment moved on to slam-dunking trapeze acrobats and the clowning of the Timberwolves mascot.

For traditional English sports fans, raised on the earthier delights and of third division football or freezing rugby union Saturday afternoons, it must all have made for a slightly disconcerting spectacle. In its present incarnation, the NBA believes in non-stop visual and audio diversion. If the teams are off court, whether for a time-out or a scheduled break between quarters, the peripheral entertainers fill the void, for fear, as the saying goes, that a conversation might break out.

The audience is made to feel part of the theatre, with on-the-spot competitions and what not.

From the NBA's perspective, these innovations make sense. Basketball is a traditional sport and it has to adapt. While its global profile is forbidding, at home things have not always been rosy, with television audiences falling in recent years and the whiff of scandal in the betting scam perpetrated by top referee Tim Donaghy and a sexual harassment case overshadowing one of the league's biggest franchises, the New York Knicks.

Under David Stern's canny eye, the NBA soared in popularity and profile during the prime years of Michael Jordan and, for all the stunningly talented athletes on show even in London, the retirement of Jordan has left a chasm which is simply impossible to fill until the distant hope that a better or more magnetic ball-player might materialise.

And although the London match was essentially an exhibition, a smorgasbord of the typical NBA experience, there did seem to be the danger of the basketball getting lost in the hype.

The general manager of the Celtics is Danny Ainge, probably the most boyish looking grandfather on this earth. The general manager of Minnesota is Kevin McHale, an erudite seven-footer with a face straight out of The Irish RM and a gait like Herman Munster. Back in the 1980s, both played alongside Larry Bird on arguably the finest NBA team ever. The league began to soar in profile, in main because of the polemical rivalry between Bird's Celtics and Magic Johnson's glittering LA Lakers. But it was still a very different league. The old Boston Garden was a glorious dump, and under the stern counsel of the club's patriarch, Red Auerbach, crowd entertainment was limited to the background sound of a Hammond organ. The game was the thing. It would have been impossible for that ascetic principal to have survived the explosion in image and television rights, marketing and inordinately inflated players salaries that transformed the NBA in the 1990s.

But seeing McHale standing amidst all the glitz and glamour in London, there was the unavoidable sense of something lost. As with all sports associations, the constant headaches for the NBA and the club owners is to devise new ways to sell the game. As Stern reminded his audience on Wednesday evening, the London game was broadcast live to consumers who had signed up for a wheeze devised between the television company ESPN and a major mobile phone network.

"They are watching the games on their cell phones," said Stern with a smile that suggested he endorsed the old north of England maxim that there is "nowt queer as folk". "It isn't necessarily the way I would want to watch a game, but that doesn't count on ratings. There is something new happening always. So we market. We promote, We expand digitally. And then we hope."

And they also make brilliant use of their players as ambassadors. The NBA season is absurdly gruelling, with 80 regular-season games augmented by constant travel across a vast continent and regular training. And that is before teams even begin the play-offs, which is when the real season begins. The whistle-stop tour of Europe made for a demanding pre-season for the Boston and Minnesota players.

"It is kind of hitting me, I am losing my voice," admitted Paul Pierce. "There has been a lot of travelling. But it was great fun and we got some things done we needed to get done. I feel like we are expanding out here. They are great fans out here - I have been to London before and it is a great city. The were really into the game and they could spot a play in front of them."

Players like Pierce are essentially just paving a way for the future. Establishing a European team is not of paramount concern to the NBA and, if that happens, it will come down to the willingness of an investor, like the oligarchs who are controlling England's football clubs, to sign the cheque for the necessary millions.

When Ray Allen observed that the presence of an NBA team in Europe was unlikely to happen in his lifetime as an NBA player, his team-mate Garnett offered a wry grin. "The Big Ticket" has been pounding the gleaming floors of NBA stadiums since he was drafted as a high school sensation back in 1995. He has won all garlands apart from an NBA championship ring and now, in his thirties, that honour is all he has left to play for.

"If it doesn't happen in your career," he guffawed, "then it sure won't happen in mine."