The NBA, and why it is O.K. to be a Bandwagoner..

[Alex Italo]

I'm Brazilian and obviously never had a NBA hometown team...
When I was young I had a T-shirt with the Bulls logo on it. So I watched my first NBA game on TV and it was one the 91' finals and I tought "Wow. The team that is on my shirt is really good... I'll root for they..." and so I'm a Bulls fan ever since...

Here in Brazil, there are no Bulls games broadcasted. Besides that, I read the news and search for game scores everyday six years after my team got really awful... So, I guess I was a bandwagoner in the day I started to root for them... now, I'm a loyal fan. The only thing that have changed is the fact that now I'm more interested in other teams, just because they have Brazilians on their rosters, like Denver, Phoenix and now Toronto and New Orleans.

Brazil is a football (soccer)-based country, and football teams don't move away when the ratings are bad or the owner dislikes the city... and a star player can't win a game by himself... so our culture estimulates the idea that you have a team for life, even when it's relegated to a lower division.
Root for a player and change teams just for him is kind of a chick thing here... Girls think a player is "cute" and follow him wherever he goes.

[Drex]

I started watching the NBA in the '99-'00 season, so I jumped on the Blazers bandwagon 'cause of Pippen and Rasheed. I also liked Iverson and the Sixers, and I've been a fan of those two teams for the past 5 years. Well, as kid from South-America, I liked MJ, 'cause I only knew him at the time, and I could watch sometimes a couple of highlight from the finals or ASG in the 90s. But now that I know a lot more about the NBA and it's history, he's my all-time favorite player.