Dewayne Hankins was taking in a summer league practice last July when a Portland Trail Blazers staff member sauntered up to ask a curious question:
“Are you ready to have 800 million new sets of eyes on your product?”
“I kind of laughed,” Hankins, the Blazers’ president, said. “Then summer league happened, and for those who got to see, it was quite the experience.”
And the experience, it turns out, was only the beginning.
Since the Blazers stunned the NBA universe by acquiring Chinese center Yang Hansen on draft night, he has quickly emerged as one of the most popular — and marketable — players on the roster. His addition has been a boon for Blazers’ merchandise sales, expanded their brand across the globe and thrust millions of new eyeballs on the team as it enters a season of renewed hope and optimism.
A relative unknown before the draft, Hansen has captivated fans with his effervescent personality, happy-go-lucky demeanor and basketball potential, providing a double dose of positive mojo for a franchise creeping out of a multiyear roster rebuild. On the court, teammates have praised his smooth passing, soft shooting touch, intelligence and nimble footwork, and coach Chauncey Billups says the 7-foot-2 rookie “will definitely play” this season. Off the court, the Blazers are positioning themselves to capitalize on his budding stardom.
The Blazers’ roster features seven international players, including building blocks Deni Avdija (Israel), Toumani Camara (Belgium) and Shaedon Sharpe (Canada). But none have the worldwide appeal of Hansen, who seems poised to become the global face of the Blazers.
At a time the NBA is starting to reassert its dominance in Chinese sports culture, the country represents a gigantic untapped market for a franchise located some 6,300 miles away from Hansen’s hometown in the Shandong Province.
“When we drafted Yang, of course I was very excited for what those opportunities meant for our organization globally,” Hankins said. “I think it’s really important for us to make sure we build that relationship. There are fans that may have heard of us in China, but there’s plenty of new fans who are hearing about the Portland Trail Blazers for the first time. And I think we need to be authentic and focused in our relationship-building … with them. If you do that well, I think there’s business opportunities down the road.”
The opportunities, in fact, are already surfacing.
China’s NBA love affair rekindled
There was a time, not too long ago, when the NBA’s popularity in China was unrivaled.
The seed was planted in August 1979, when the Washington Bullets became the first NBA team to visit the country, playing two exhibition games there shortly after President Jimmy Carter normalized diplomatic relations between the United States and China. Fast forward two decades later, as China’s Yao Ming blossomed from a No. 1 overall pick into an eight-time All-Star for the Houston Rockets, and the sport had since become the country’s most popular.
And it remained so long after Yao retired in 2011 — NBA games drew nearly 500 million Chinese viewers in 2019, according to multiple published reports.
“China has always been enamored with American culture,” said Lauren Anderson, director of the Warsaw Sports Business Center at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business.
But the fixation fizzled in October 2019, when Daryl Morey, then general manager of the Rockets, tweeted support for Hong Kong protestors, who were opposing Beijing’s influence on their city. Amid the fallout, NBA games were pulled off the air in China and Chinese companies terminated sponsorships with the league.
Months later, Commissioner Adam Silver said the controversy would cost the league hundreds of millions of dollars, and the fractured relationship lingered for years.
But it’s currently on the mend. Broadcasts of NBA games resumed in China in 2022. Stars such as LeBron James and Stephen Curry have made trips to the Far East to tout their respective shoe companies. The Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns are playing exhibition games this month in Macao.
China’s love affair with the NBA has been rekindled.
“Basketball is the No. 1 sport in China,” veteran Chinese sports journalist Renjun Bao said. “When I grew up, maybe soccer was. But for the young generation in China now, basketball is the most popular. Yao is a big part of this, of course. Basketball made a big, big jump with him. But, also, the Chinese soccer national team — which was pretty good for a while — has been really bad for the last two decades. Chinese fans were looking for something else.”
Pretty soon, they won’t have to look far to find Hansen and the Blazers.
Chinese media company Tencent, which owns the exclusive rights to broadcast NBA games in China, plans to send a crew to call the Blazers’ first few regular season games, marking the first time the company has done so. Tencent will air most, if not all, Portland’s regular-season games this season, and Bao said it is projecting that an average of 10 million Chinese basketball fans will watch each game — an increase of more than 9 million from last season.
Hansen is the ninth player from China selected in the NBA draft and the most prominent since Yao. So even though Hansen hasn’t played in a game yet, he already has become one of the top five athletes in China, Bao said.
“People could argue he’s the most popular,” added Boa, who moved to the United States more than 20 years ago and does freelance work for Tencent. “It might take a year or two, but if he can (average) 10 points every game, there will be highlights every day for six or seven months in China. I think he will be the most popular athlete. Chinese fans, they have needed this for a long time.”
The country’s fervor over Hansen at NBA summer league last July certainly bolsters Bao’s prediction.
Tencent sent a film crew to Las Vegas to produce a documentary on Hansen and more than a dozen Chinese reporters covered his day-to-day happenings for a thirsty audience across the globe. When Tencent aired a free broadcast of one Portland summer league game, 5.2 million people in China tuned in, dwarfing the 1.12 million who watched No. 1 overall pick Cooper Flagg’s debut on ESPN. CCTV-5, China’s main national sports channel, preempted live coverage of ping pong tournaments to show Blazers games, a rarity for the ping-pong crazed country.
All the while, the Blazers’ social media platforms saw an unprecedented surge in eyeballs, and Chinese social media platforms such as RedNote, Douyin and Weibo saw Blazers-related engagement numbers soar.
“I’ve been with the team almost 13 years and we were No. 1 in the league in social media rankings in July during summer league, which I’ve never seen before,” Hankins said. “A lot of that was due to the incredible audience that Hansen brings to us. And then, in terms of our Chinese platforms, which I’m still just getting to know … there’s been incredible, explosive growth.”
It’s not exclusive to television and social media. The Blazers enjoyed a stunning 813% year-over-year spike in merchandise revenue during the offseason, as Hansen’s No. 16 jersey became a must-have item. Hankins said online jersey orders spanned the globe, stretching from China to California and everywhere in between, a surge that was unlike anything he had seen for a rookie. The closest comparison, Hankins said, came in 2019, when future Hall of Famer Carmelo Anthony unexpectedly joined the Blazers a month into the season.
But unlike then, when Anthony arrived out of nowhere, the Blazers are preparing for what lies ahead.
Blazers’ marketing blitz
Shortly after Portland landed Hansen in the draft, Hankins said, he and his staff “quickly mobilized” at the Moda Center to discuss the immediate future and brainstorm how best to capitalize on the possibilities.
It’s been a two-month “crash course” ever since.
The Blazers hired a Mandarin-speaking employee for a newly-created digital content specialist job that will focus on Chinese social media platforms. And the team intends to hire someone in the future who focuses on generating business opportunities in the Far East. Fans are likely to see more advertising from Chinese companies in the not-too-distant future, including, perhaps, on Moda Center courtside advertising strips at the scorer’s table.
Galen Davies, the Blazers chief revenue officer, and Sam Morgan, the vice president of commercial partnership sales, will be visiting Macao this month to attend the NBA’s preseason games and start to build relationships in China.
Hankins said the organization will be intentional and methodical about how it approaches marketing Hansen, placing a priority on long-term gains. The strategy came together, in part, after Hankins spoke to Houston president Gretchen Sheirr about how the Rockets handled the surge of international attention Yao brought.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from their conversation, Hankins said, is that Sheirr said the Rockets remained beloved in China long after Yao left the NBA.
“It wasn’t like Yao retired and then people stopped watching the Rockets,” Hankins said. “In fact, Tracy McGrady became the most popular player in China, just because fans watched him play with Yao. The effects carried on long past his career. Assuming Hansen has a great career, hopefully we’ll see add-on effects for decades. That’s the goal.”
Bao concurs.
“Before Yao, the Rockets were just another NBA team,” he said. “He’s been retired for almost 15 years now and the Rockets are still one of the top three most popular teams in China. Hansen could do the same for the Trail Blazers.”
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At the very least, the Blazers have a likable player to market.
Since he arrived in Portland, Hansen’s interviews have been fun and refreshing, featuring a healthy mix of self-deprecating humor and light-hearted jabs. He has noted multiple times that his two favorite pastimes are sleeping and eating. And at media day earlier this week, Hansen poked fun at his spotty English, calling it “Chinglish,” because he can’t help but bounce back and forth between the two languages when he attempts to veer away from his native tongue.
As he adapts to a new culture and studies a different language, Hansen said he is placing a priority on learning to communicate with his teammates. His secret to being accepted?
A disarming smile.
“You would never slap someone who always give you a smile, right?” Hansen said, through an interpreter. “So I smile to my teammates all the time. Even if I say something wrong or act something weird, I just use my smile to stop them from their next move.”
Only time will tell if Hansen lives up to his basketball hype, but the affable rookie has already started to emerge as the global face of the Blazers.
“People in China will care about Portland in a way they never have,” Anderson said.