Clippers to get a taste of basketball-crazed China

Throngs of fans show up everywhere NBA stars go in China, creating one giant entourage. They are so persistent in their pursuit of a brush with players that you might think Clippers owner Steve Ballmer conceived his team’s slogan watching them descend upon Chris Paul and Blake Griffin.

Then again, “relentless” may not even be able to fully convey their zeal.

“We’ll see our security literally take people down,” said Griffin, a veteran of several trips to the basketball-crazed country, “and then they just get right back up and come right back at it again, so I admire their tenacity and their stick-to-itiveness.”

Nothing Griffin has seen may prepare him for the madness that awaits the Clippers upon their arrival in China on Thursday for a weeklong trip that will include two sold-out exhibition games against the Charlotte Hornets, one Saturday in Shenzen and the other Oct. 14 in Shanghai.

The star power is through the roof.

Paul, Griffin and teammate DeAndre Jordan are only part of the allure. There’s also Hornets guard Jeremy Lin, the first NBA player of Taiwanese descent who sparked the Linsanity phenomenon and will be playing with an NBA team for the first time in China. There’s Ballmer, widely known in the increasingly tech-savvy country because of his previous role as chief executive of Microsoft.

The decibel level figures to be most earsplitting wherever Michael Jordan goes. The Hornets owner, still generally considered the most famous basketball figure on the planet 12 years after his retirement, will be making what NBA officials said is his first trip to China in more than a decade.

“If you think the fans over there like us,” Paul said, “wait until you see how they feel about M.J.”

Former Houston Rockets center Yao Ming will serve as an unofficial host, accompanying the teams to several stops on their itinerary.

The Clippers will tour local sites and conduct a youth basketball clinic in addition to an open practice as part a fan appreciation event. Their itinerary won’t stop just because they need a break to let their body clocks adjust to being nearly halfway across the world after a 13-hour flight.

“They’re not going to care if you’re sleepy, not sleepy or nothing,” Paul said. “When it’s time to be somewhere, they’re going to tell you be there.”

NBA officials are treating the exhibition games like they’re fit for royalty, shipping 27,974 wood squares to China to ensure the courts in both venues have a regulation-quality feel.

David Shoemaker, the NBA’s chief executive in China, said the NBA decided to hold its first-ever game in Shenzen because of the city’s strategic importance as one of the country’s tech hubs and its proximity to Hong Kong. Shanghai was also selected as a host because of its size (population: 24 million) and historic significance.

The Clippers played in Shanghai and Beijing during the 2012 preseason and Paul was a member of the United States’ gold medal-winning team in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, increasing their popularity in a country where the estimated 300 million basketball fans outnumber the entire U.S. population.

Paul and Griffin also have made stops in China in recent summers promoting their shoe brands in what the NBA considers its top market outside the U.S. It would be fair to describe their encounters with fans as intimate.

“There’s no idea or such thing as privacy,” Griffin said. “They’re just up on you immediately.”

Clippers fans back home might feel a bit left out considering the games’ tipoff times on NBA TV. The game Saturday is scheduled to start at 10:30 p.m. PDT and the game Oct. 14 at 5 a.m. PDT, potentially calling for late-night pizza and morning bagels.

Players conceded some reservations about the food options abroad. The Clippers will provide three meals a day at the team hotel, Coach Doc Rivers said, which might be preferable to street vendors.

“They warn us not to do that just for safety reasons,” Griffin said of trying his luck with foreign delicacies. “I think me and C.P. ate about like 50 club sandwiches every single day” during a previous visit.

There could be some actual basketball drama as part of what otherwise would be considered routine exhibitions. Clippers swingman Lance Stephenson will be facing the team that traded him in June after one season.

“I actually want to go after them,” Stephenson said of the Hornets. “I definitely have something to prove after coming off that terrible season that I had last year.”

Friendships will also be rekindled, including the one between Griffin and Hornets forward-center Spencer Hawes, who was traded by the Clippers as part of the Stephenson deal. Griffin said he speaks to Hawes by phone almost every day.

Communication could be as easy as yelling “Hey, Blake!” from five feet away for the crush of fans who figure to treat the Clippers like rock stars throughout their week in China.

“It’s one of those things you almost never get used to,” Paul said of the frenzied followers. “The amount of support you get year in and year out, it’s always a good time to go there.”