Adam Silver eyes 4 European NBA franchises

The 2014-15 edition of NBA's annual Global Games initiative continues Thursday, as the pleasantly surprising Milwaukee Bucks will face off against the very-much-the-opposite-of-that New York Knicks at the O2 Arena in London, England. (If it strikes you as odd that the NBA, as Grantland's Jason Concepcion puts it, "looked at the Bucks’ 15-67 record from last season and the Knicks’ 37-45 mark from last year and decided, 'Yes, send them to a country that barely likes basketball,'" you are not alone!)

The run-up to Thursday's tilt has featured a number of now-typical "hey, we're playing somewhere different!" conventions — sight-seeing, pop quizzes on familiarity with local slang, visits to the home stadia of soccer clubs, and so on. NBA commissioners greeting the foreign press isn't quite as exciting a travel tradition as a trip to Stamford Bridge, but it's part of the process all the same, and in his chat with the media, Commissioner Adam Silver used a pretty curious turn of phrase to describe the league's commitment to continued growth on — and eventual expansion into — the Continent, according to Owen Gibson of The Guardian: