Baseball and soccer are well-established professional sports in Japan. And now it's time for the bj-league, Japan's first professional basketball league, to take necessary steps to earn its place as an established, respected league.
What follows are suggestions and a critical analysis of the fourth-year league to date.
For starters, three ex-NBA players — Joe Bryant, David Benoit and John Neumann — are head coaches in the bj-league. That's 25 percent of the league's head coaches, folks. An impressive figure, indeed, but they aren't widely known among Japan's sports fans.