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NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION MEDIA CONFERENCE

October 13, 2010

THE MODERATOR: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the New Century representative Mr. Li Qun, and NBA Commissioner Mr. David Stern. It is also our pleasure to welcome our VIP guest, Mr. Li Yuanwei, Vice President of the CBA, and officials from Guangdong Provincial Sports Bureau and Guangdong City Government. Now I'm pleased to welcome Commissioner Stern to give his opening remark.
DAVID STERN: Thank you. Again, I've thanked you many times. And thank all of you for coming. I'm delighted to be here, and I'm honored to be joined by Mr. Li Qun for a special announcement about basketball development that we will make shortly.
But first let me say how happy we are to be back for our fifth China Games, and I very much want to thank the CBA. Vice President Li, I want to very much thank you for our partnership and our determination to grow the sport of basketball. I also want to thank the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Sport and the Guangzhou Sports Bureau for their continued support. And I want to also thank our partners who helped bring the NBA experience to our millions of fans in China.
This is my fourth time in the Wukesong Arena, first in the 2008 Olympics, which were so wonderful, and then the last two China games, and the building keeps getting better looking.
Saturday's game will be the first event at the state-of-the-art Guangzhou International Sports Arena, and Shanghai has this new beautiful arena being used now in connection with the World Expo, quite a different from our first visit here in 2004.
I'm sure we'll have very exciting games and everyone will enjoy that, and I'm sure you're especially glad to see that Yao Ming is back. I know that I and the entire NBA are also glad that he's back.
And in addition to the games, as we always do, the NBA players give back to their community. Yesterday the Nets and NBA legends dedicated new basketball hoops and conducted a clinic for youngsters at the Zhongguancun No. 3 Elementary School, and in Guangzhou, the Rockets will conduct a clinic for 35 hearing-impaired students at the Guangzhou Sports University.
And I should say that after these games are over, I get to go home and see the beginning of what I know will be one of our best seasons ever with many changes amongst the teams and their players, many teams thinking that they have a chance to be champion and our players primed and ready to go for the 2010-2011 season.
Mr. Li joins me from DongGuan New Century to announce that the NBA and DongGuan New Century are planning to open an elite basketball training center for players ages 13 to 17. It will be in DongGuan and will be the first of its kind in Asia. DongGuan New Century will develop and operate the facility while the NBA will create a basketball training curriculum and provide a technical director to implement this program. That curriculum will feature visits from NBA coaches to provide the players with specialized instruction, and there will be instruction on strength and conditioning, nutrition, and overall player and coaching development.
We're very delighted to be doing this because we think it's the next step in our partnership with the CBA for the development of youth elite basketball players in China.
It is my great pleasure to turn over the microphone to Mr. Li.
LI QUN: I'm very happy to be here to attend this press conference. Actually it gives me a lot of misgivings and worries when I sit together with Mr. David Stern (laughter).
NBA and DongGuan New Century Club will co-sponsor and set up an NBA training center and school in DongGuan. This NBA training center and school is funded by DongGuan New Century Club with the approval from the CBA and the support from the DongGuan People's Government. The total investment of this special training center and school is up to about 15 million renminbi yuan.
This training center and school is set to be completed by 2015, and it will be open to enrollment of new kids from around the country, and it is expected that it can enroll as total as about 300 trainees within three years. This school is located in the vicinity of the DongGuan Municipal Sports School and the DongGuan Swimming Sports Management Center. Altogether eight courts with NBA professional flooring system and other advanced facilities will be installed there.
Basketball sport has become a very popular sport in China. Thanks to the CBA league games and together with the NBA popularity in China, basketball as a game has become a very important game that has won much more publicity in China. However, having said all that, we still see great room for further improvement in terms of the comprehensive quality and strength of our youth for the basketball profession, and we need to develop a new training system. That's why I see that our training system, especially for the youth in China, is facing unprecedented dilemmas.
So in order to better improve our overall training qualities among China's youth, NBA together with DongGuan Century have co-entrusted some specialized companies to manage and operate this training school for basketball. So we will integrate with the international practice to co-explore the new training systems for the youth players so that we can better assimilate the advanced philosophies and training ideas from NBA so that we can train better our coaches and our players.
At the same time, we also bear in mind the special features and characteristics of Chinese players and China's basketball profession so we can find a new path out that is most suitable to the Chinese context.
As a nonprofit organization intended for the training of future potential basketball players for China, our training school and center has also garnered a lot of support from CBA, Guangdong Provincial Sports Bureau, and the DongGuan Municipal Government. I hope that such a famous basketball city as DongGuan can be treated as a springboard upon which we can provide unstopping type of human resources and new players for CBA and leagues at all levels. At the same time I wish all the best of our corroboration between NBA and the DongGuan New Century Club. Thank you very much.
THE MODERATOR: Now I would like to open the floor to media for questions, and please state clearly your affiliation.

Q. This question is for Mr. David Stern. You know that this DongGuan New Century training school and center is a new attempt that you have ever delivered, so from the NBA's perspective what measures are you going to take to localize your practice so you can integrate your advantages together with the local strengths to cultivate more people, especially new young people for the future?
DAVID STERN: I think that our approach will be to bring the basketball know-how and the strength that we provide, but we will learn from our local partners at DongGuan New Century and their experience, also, with a CBA team or two in Guangdong and the other CBA teams that we hope ultimately will participate. And since this will truly be a collaboration, that we will learn from each other. We don't have a set policy because we would not presume to talk about the local addition to what we do.

Q. Mr. Stern, this is the fifth time the NBA China game has come to China, and this time what do you think it means for the fans? What does it mean for yourself?
DAVID STERN: For me it's a demonstration of our continued commitment to China basketball and our partnership with the CBA and the sports authorities in Guangzhou and Beijing. And I must say that personally I just love to see the enthusiasm of our China fans for the game of basketball and the way the game is being played by youngsters and the CBA and the youth leagues. It's all very exciting, and that makes us very happy.

Q. What is special this time? The China Games have come to China previously. What's special about this time?
DAVID STERN: It's special that it's not special. Yao Ming being well to play, now that's special.

Q. This question is for Mr. Li: Upon the completion of the school next year, do you have any further plans to join hands together with NBA next year and onwards for the co-cultivation of more human resources?
LI QUN: Our collaboration is intended for training new elites and young people upon the completion of this new school. So from next year onward, we are going to launch a series of marketing campaigns together with the implementation of some already-existing projects so that we can really learn something from the NBA's perspective in terms of the new philosophies and the new concepts which will surely better help ourselves to cultivate a team of young people who really love basketball.
You know, China is a country with such a large population, so if we can really do a good job in terms of this high-profile training school and center, several years' time from now, we are going to let other countries feel intimidated. So just wait and see. Thanks.

Q. Last year NBA and CBA signed an agreement for the training of the coaches, and this year you have also some new collaboration projects. Do you have any comments on those new collaborations among you two, and do you have any comments to make about the future possible collaborations between you two?
DAVID STERN: Well, I think last year was very successful, and we're going to do it all again. We just had a coach Rolando Blackman here to give a coaching clinic to all CBA coaches and all NBL coaches and many youth team coaches. We will be bringing CBA coaches to the United States again and have them learn from NBA development league training camp as well as NBA coaches, and there will be visits to the market, to China, again this year by other NBA coaches.
So you get the idea; we will emphasize the values of our game, the excitement of our game, initiatives like the academy to grow elite players, and also to help develop the game itself through the coaching clinics, the referee clinics and the many things that we will be doing together with the CBA.

Q. Actually I have two questions for Mr. Stern: CBA has a lot of teams, so why do you particularly select New Century as the team for you to collaborate with? Secondly, Yao is a very important player for the team, and you used to say we were here before Yao was here and also we were here after he was here, so do you have any further plans to further reinforce your point in this regard, even if Yao is going to retire in the future?
DAVID STERN: Everybody retires in the future, but our first -- our relationship with CCTV goes back over 20 years, and I expect that it will continue for another 20 years, and that's the primary way that we bring our great game to the audience that CCTV serves so well. So I believe that the popularity of our game will continue, and I look forward to always working with Yao, whether he's active or he decides to do something else in life. I know it will involve the growth and development of basketball in China.
And DongGuan New Century has shown for us a commitment, a special commitment, to use its resources to grow our game by bettering the young elite players, and to make the facility available to young people across China. And we expect because of their CBA membership and their collaboration within the CBA that they represent not only DongGuan but the entire CBA in this endeavor with us. They are the perfect partner for us.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you, and this is a perfect press conference. Ten minutes to go before the game, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Commissioner Stern, thank you, Mr. Li Qun, and thank you from all our friends. Enjoy the game between Houston Rockets and the New Jersey Nets. Thank you, everybody.

End of FastScripts

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