Last night, along with millions of other Chinese NBA fans, I stayed up to watch Game 7 of the 2009 NBA Playoffs between the LA Lakers and Houston Rockets. The match tipped off at 3:30AM local time – so not exactly prime time for the world’s largest basketball market. Many years ago Chinese fans’ best hopes of following the game would have been hitting the refresh button on the NBA.com live box score every minute or so, but things have change in the 21st century.

Despite having to get up for work the next day, I decided to stay up until 3am instead of banking in some sleep hours, just to make sure I had the right setup going into the game. While two channels in Shanghai broadcasted the game live – the government owned (CCTV 5) channel focused on sports, and the privately ran Shanghai Sports channel – I was forced to rely on the internet as I only receive digital reception as opposed to the standard analog which currently carries these 2 channels.

But no biggie, as many Chinese youngsters across the country were in the same situation as me – whether in some dorm room somewhere shared with a half dozen classmates or in their parent’s homes wanting to follow the game without their parents knowing – essentially with a lack of personal access to TV. Such surroundings and lifestyles has developed a culture in China, where individuals rely on the internet for anything and everything.

Live sports streaming particularly is a popular alternative to TV in China for today’s youth, and while the quality is worlds apart from the HD quality that our fellow fans in the U.S get to enjoy, it is certainly watchable.

So I spent about an hour before tip off making sure I had all 15 or so different free software that people used for streaming games, I ran some checks to see which stream could be the best quality and after a considerable amount of time I had to concede to watching it over the Chinese commentating on CCTV 5. My Mandarin listening skills are quite limited but it doesn’t take a fluent speaker to realize that the Chinese commentators still have a way to go before reaching the likes of Marv Albert…or yet alone Reggie Miller! They seem to watch it more as fans than trained commentators with often screaming and cheering, and analysis of plays usually limited to “Nice Basket!” or “Beautiful!”. This is an area that the NBA in China needs to develop because quality commentating truly makes a difference, you don’t realize it until you’ve really watched a game anywhere outside the U.S.

So there I was in the wee hours of the morning, eyes red from a long day of mental and physical preparation to be able to stay up for this game, laying on my bed in my PJ’s, laptop on my lap, my poor girlfriend subjected to my NBA addiction sleeping trying to sleep besides me, and me watching a sub-Betamax quality NBA stream with Chinese commentating blasting on my earphones. “Where will amazing happen this year” is this year’s playoff slogan, well I’d like to believe us international NBA fans who have to put up with this contribute a little ‘amazing’ each and every year.

After the first half and a decisive defensive showing by the Lakers, I decided to call it a night and conserve some energy for the day ahead and another Game 7 that I refuse to miss out on.

Before I went to sleep, I passed by NBA.com’s official stream site on the internet for Chinese fans, NBA.tom.com/video, where thousands of like minded fans were live chatting in a chat box besides the stream. A quick scroll through of the chat revealed the expected: lots of swearing and exclamation marks, and people cheering the Rockets on despite what seemed like an insurmountable task ever since China’s own Yao Ming broke his foot.

But much like this years’ Houston Rockets, the Chinese basketball fans were indifferent to the reality at hand after so many years of being ignored – and knew that tonight, the only thing lost would be a good night’s sleep.