Mark Fischer spent 12 years trying to grow the NBA in China and Japan, where he did not have the luxury of leveraging local talent.
Big-league basketball sold well. But in Japan, the league was always running at a deficit.
“As much or more as any other market, it’s very important to have athletes from Japan in the league or in the organization,” Fischer, head of the UFC’s Asian Operations division, told MMAjunkie.com. “The NBA was never able to achieve that. There was never any Japanese good enough.”