When most of the players on either side of tomorrow’s Game 2 matchup were children, there were no foreign players to look up to in the Finals. Arvydas Sabonis was the Blazers center when they took on Chicago in the 1992 Championship, but every international player – save the Cavaliers Zydrunas Ilgauskas – was instead paying attention to the man they invariably list as their childhood hoops idol: M.J.

(If you ask any of the foreign players in this year’s Finals who was their main influence coming up, they’ll immediately list Michael Jordan – and almost every one of them will call him “M.J.”)

But now these players have a chance to influence children in their own countries. The Cavaliers have three international stars – Ilgauskas (Lithuania), Sasha Pavlovic (Montenegro) and Anderson Varejao (Brazil). The Spurs lead the Western Conference with six – Tim Duncan (U.S. Virgin Islands), Francisco Elson (Netherlands), Manu Ginobili and Fabricio Oberto (Argentina), Tony Parker (France) and Beno Udrih (Slovenia).

“M.J. was the player me and all my brothers followed since I was like 13 or 14 years old,” said San Antonio’s Manu Ginobili. “When I was younger, we didn’t even think about coming out of Argentina and going to the NBA. We thought about playing for local teams or in the Olympics.”

The NBA is a different game since M.J. led his Bulls past the Blazers. Back then, international players were a rarity and merely added spice to the game. Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon was a difference-maker in the Finals. Players like Sabonis, Vlade Divac, Detlef Shrempf and Jordan’s mate – Toni Kukoc – were just complementary pieces.

Now, the Spurs three best players are international and where would the Cavaliers be without their All-Star center and burgeoning young talents like Pavlovic and the Wild Thing?

“(Basketball) is getting bigger every year in Brazil,” smiled Varejao. “Every year we get more and more players in the league. Not just from Brazil, but from all of South America.

“With me in the Finals, it’s very popular everywhere in Brazil. I call my friends and they say, ‘Man, you don’t know how big the NBA Finals are here. Everyone’s talking about you!’ And I say, ‘Come on, man. It’s a soccer country.’”

Soccer may be the world sport, but with the growing popularity of the NBA in countries across the globe – and the growing chance that kids watching across the globe can one day compete on this level – the league is only going to continue to ascend.

With the current amount of international players in the league, it would be possible to create five teams of all the players – that’s 83 players from 37 countries and territories. This past season, Dirk Nowitzki (Germany) was the league’s MVP and Andrea Bargnani (Italy) was its top overall selection in the Draft.

The NBA has 11 offices around the world, has distributed over 45,000 hours of NBA games to 215 countries and territories in 41 languages, and has even developed 16 marketing partnerships in China. Fifty percent of all traffic on NBA.com is from fans located outside the United States.

“There’s nothing bigger than (the Finals) in Serbia right now,” said Sasha Pavlovic. “Basketball is very big there. It’s a world sport now and I think everyone is watching that. The NBA Finals have always been big, because when I was a kid I watched every Finals game.”

Tony Parker is representing France, which has made one of the biggest splashes in the league. “The NBA’s very big in France. We have seven NBA players, so it’s doing very well over there.”

David Stern’s legacy is to leave the NBA as not just an American sport, but a world sport. And the Association is well on its way to doing just that.

With the Cavaliers and the Spurs tangling in the Finals, kids from eight countries around the world can see their countrymen and heroes on the biggest stage the NBA has to offer. And they can dream that one day, it will be them – swishing and dishing under the bright lights.

“You never know what’s going to happen in life, but I kind of felt like I could make it one day,” said Sasha. “It was every kid’s dream to play in the NBA and I’m living that dream right now.”