YAYsports! NBA

Brian Windhorst made mention yesterday of a Nike campaign in China that asks the simple question: LeBron or Kobe?

Well, that there is the ad itself, and we’re Photoshop free for the first time in probably 11 months or so. (It’s quite liberating, but it won’t last - don’t worry.)

Anyway, our first thought when seeing this was “damn, there’s a whole other part to the world out there that doesn’t care about us.” Once we got over that, we moved on to exploring Nike China, which is like all different and stuff.

Here’s Kobe’s Nike China site.

And then LeBron’s Nike China site.

The first thing you’re gonna notice is that the load time is unbelievably slow, especially Kobe’s. It takes at least two seconds for every one second that goes by on the counter.

On to the campaigns themselves, they’re riding Kobe’s 81 pretty hard. This is because of the time zone thing, by the way. Y’see, in China, Kobe’s 81-point game just happened yesterday.

As for LeBron, they’re playing him as a tough, thuggish type over there, apparently. The type of guy who walks around with his shirt off holding basketballs out to his sides. That’s a lot like us, which means we relate, which means we’re a customer.

Let’s get back to what prompted this shoddy and underdone analysis, however. Kobe or LeBron? An interestingly vague question, to be sure.

What are they really asking? Is it “who do you want on your team?” “Who would win one-on-one?” “Who would you want for a best friend?” “Whose name means Golden Wave Fighter?” We have no clue, because we don’t speak Chinese anymore, but we answer “both” to all questions (but really we mean LeBron, because of our awkward man-crush).