The commissioner of the NBA Adam Silver says that Paris could be the next city outside of America to host one of the season games in the next few years. Silver has recently met with the arena entertainment company AEG who proposed holding a game in the capital’s newly renovated AccorHotels Arena. After the meeting, the commissioner told a press conference that the idea proposed by AEG was “something that we will look at closely” but gave no indication of if and when we might see it happen.

The sport has already become massively popular overseas in other places around Europe, as proven by the turn out to the NBA match in London in January. The American sport managed to sell out all of the 20,000 seats in the O2 Arena, with big stars like Gordon Ramsay and footballers Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Olivier Giroud amongst the massive crowd. Former Chelsea striker Didier Drogba even made it on the court himself to show the crowd his basketball skills at half-time. The O2 Arena is also owned by the AEG group proposing the new Paris match, so the stadium is obviously making a lot of money out of hosting these games.

But the sport’s popularity in England isn’t something new. This was the sixth NBA season game to be held in London in as many years, and there are no signs of the interest in the sport dwindling for British fans anytime soon. Even when the game isn’t being played in their country, more and more British fans are watching and even betting on the regular NBA season. British bookmakers like Coral offer odds on every game in the NBA season as well as outright odds on where each team will finish in the league. You can even sign up for a free bet on the Coral website where they’ll give you a £20 free bet when you deposit £5 when you open your account. Even if you’re a fan of the more typically British sports like football, horse racing on cricket, you could use your free bet on any of the wide range of sports on the Coral website.

Although the AEG stadium group are the people really pushing this idea, it seems the teams are also keen to play more games in Europe. Despite being in unfamiliar surroundings, both the Toronto Raptors and Orlando Magic showed they were as eager as ever to win the game. Many English supporters would have probably been confident placing their free bet on Toronto Raptor to win, as the team were on a run of three successive victories before this game. But it wasn’t until overtime when Toronto could secure the narrow victory 106-103 over Orlando in the nail biting contest. Toronto always looked like the best performing team, but they gave away several double-digit margins towards the end of the match.