The NBA announced today that two preseason games will be played in Europe this fall: The Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz will meet in the O2 Arena in London on October 6th 2009. Additionally, a second game is scheduled but the exact date, teams and place have not been revealed so far.
As the International Herald Tribune reports, David Stern said that
We’re in discussions with a couple of potential venues. It would be better for us to have either (Chicago and Utah) play each other or even one of the teams play a team based outside the United States.
So there is the possibility to again see a matchup between a Euroleague team and an NBA team, which would be way more interesting than the sloppy games we saw in Europe last fall. If both compete against each other, just in another venue, the favored cities would probably be Moscow or Istanbul, in order to keep the local fans happy by showing them their national heroes Andrei Kirilenko or Mehmet Okur. We will see and keep you updated about this.
Oh, I almost forgot to tell you: Stern also announced that a NBA regular season game will be played in London within the next three years.
I’m running out of runway. I said we’re going to have a regular season game in London before the 2012 Olympics, so that means … a game projected either in 2010, 2011 or possibly 2012.
