The Lin talk made me think of this. Are there more Rockets fans in China and east asia than there are in the US? Yao Ming is still a pretty big media figure in China and of course, he only played for one team. Ours!
^yeah I bet that's actually something I didn't think about. We can't match a Nike shoe deal in the New York market but we have a ton of endorsement potential for another successful asian (and particularly chinese) player.
again I just want to pointout, I recently went to China about 1 year ago. And it seemed Rockets fans weren't existent. Everyone was either a Kobe, Lebron, or for someone reason KG fan. Their posters, shoes, accessories blah blah were everywhere and no one seemed to care about Yao or the Rockets. This was in Beijing, Tianjing, and Shanghai. There was an occasional Yao poster here and there but Kobe, Lebron, and KG seemed the most dominate.