The NBA Europe Live Tour is a series of basketball - friendly games , in which several teams from the North American professional league National Basketball Association (NBA) as part of their pre-season in Europe to train and compete against each other and against top European teams. The game series took place for the first time in 2006 and is used by the NBA to "test" audience interest in NBA basketball in Europe. It was part of the plan of the former NBA commissioner David Stern to expand the NBA into Europe. The comparisons have been part of the NBA Global Games since 2013 .
NBA teams have been playing friendly games in Europe since the 1970s. For example, the Seattle SuperSonics were guests of three German top division teams on a trip to Europe in the summer of 1984. The trip of the Atlanta Hawks to the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War in 1988 also attracted particular attention to compare them with the Soviet national team , which had played the Milwaukee Bucks in the United States a year earlier . From the second half of the 1980s, such games found their first institutional framework in the so-called McDonald's Open , which was played until 1999.
The years when the Games in Europe were part of the NBA Global Games are in italics .
Alba Berlin
Fenerbahçe Ülker
Bilbao Basket
EA7 Armani Milan
ASVEL Lyon-Villeurbanne
Maccabi Tel Aviv
