National Basketball Association

For Nets, first order of business is Russia;Deal with Stolichnaya could be first of many as team

Published Oct. 10, 2010 10:09 p.m. ET

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The New Jersey Nets might be an odd choice to be the N.B.A.'s ambassador overseas. With 12 wins last season, they are often a forgotten team even in their home state, where they fail to sell out their home games and live in the shadow of the cosmopolitan New York Knicks.

Yet the Nets are among the most active teams in courting international companies. Last year, six Chinese companies, including the electronics giant Haier, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for courtside signs at the Izod Center, where Yi Jianlian played for the Nets.

Yi was traded in the off-season, so the Nets are now focused on Russia, the home of their new owner, Mikhail D. Prokhorov, who took over the team in May. The Nets lack a Russian player, but team executives have met with dozens of companies in Russia hoping to convince a few of them that advertising with the team is a good way to reach American and Russian consumers.

On Thursday, the Nets announced a five-year sponsorship deal with Stolichnaya, the Russian vodka producer. The agreement, which Prokhorov helped arrange, is worth about $2 million a year and will include sponsored bars at the Barclays Center, the new arena the Nets are building in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.

The Nets hope to complete more deals when they visit Moscow on Sunday on their way to China, where they will play two preseason games. In Moscow, the Nets will hold a clinic for 3,000 youngsters, attend a ribbon-cutting at an Adidas store that will feature Nets gear and schmooze with business people at a reception.

''We have been talking about the Nets being a global team, and it seems really fitting that, as the first foreign owner of an N.B.A. franchise, their first trip should be to my country,'' Prokhorov said in a statement. ''It is my hope that the Nets will be the team the country roots for once the season gets under way.''

Are the Nets' efforts to court international companies a sign that they are having trouble attracting sponsors at home? Some sports marketing analysts say that the Nets are smart to piggyback on the N.B.A.'s popularity overseas, where basketball is growing faster than in the United States.

''I don't believe it's a sign of weakness, but that sports business is global,'' said David Carter, who teaches sports business at the University of Southern California. ''It's a chance for the team to build its overall brand, and big brands do well.''

The Nets are not the first team to make a push overseas. The Houston Rockets have become a brand name in China because of Yao Ming, their center. Thaddeus B. Brown, the Rockets' chief executive, said five Chinese companies had courtside signs, and Anheuser-Busch and Hewlett-Packard have signs in Mandarin at the team's arena in Houston.

N.B.A. teams have played games overseas for at least two decades. In addition to sending teams to preseason games in China, France, Italy and Spain this year, the Nets will play two regular-season games against the Toronto Raptors in London in March. The league and its teams see the games as a foothold to sell jerseys, sponsorships and television deals in Europe and Asia, and potentially attract other foreign owners. The games also mirror the changing face of the league; 20 percent of the players in the N.B.A. were born overseas.

''Our goal is to grow the interest in the game and ultimately in the N.B.A. in markets throughout the world with the recognition that, over time, fans in those countries will want to watch our games on television or various forms of digital media,'' said Adam Silver, the deputy commissioner of the N.B.A.

Russia, Silver acknowledged, is a relatively untapped market. Although N.B.A. games have been on television in Russia for more than a dozen years, basketball remains a distant third behind soccer and hockey in popularity. There are only a handful of Russian players in the N.B.A., most notably Andrei Kirilenko of the Utah Jazz and Timofey Mozgov of the Knicks.

The Nets are creating a Russian-language Web site and have replaced a marketing specialist who spoke Mandarin with someone fluent in Russian. Still, signing deals with Russian companies will be more of a chore than finding clients in China, where basketball has made deeper inroads with fans and companies.