I don’t know if anybody outside of the country of Cameroon was really paying attention to this, but this Raptors vs. Sixers matchup allows us to enjoy a sub-matchup, if you will: the clash between Cameroonian Pascal Siakam and Cameroonian Joel Embiid.
In case you haven’t looked at the box-score yet, or you’re from the future and don’t have easy access to boxscores on the HyperHologramNet 2.0, Siakam won this matchup handily, scoring nearly twice as many points as his Cameroonian counterpart (29 points to 16, to be exact). I don’t recall them ever going one-on-one at each other, but that doesn’t matter. The stats are what matter, and the stats show Siakam having a highly efficient matchup while Embiid just chucked bricks at the rim like prime Andre Drummond.
Do enough Cameroonians have access to TV/online streaming that the NBA could reasonably start hyping up this matchup a little bit more? Residents of Cameroon might not be as lucrative a demographic as Americans or Europeans, but they definitely can enjoy sports, especially when their own countrymen are competing. With televised sports come advertising and merchandising. Cameroonians are also perfect to advertise to because not a lot of American companies want to buy advertising slots in impoverished central-African countries.
Luckily, the NBA has at least three more games remaining to figure out a bold new marketing strategy that can be used to wring money out of the Cameroonian people. It’s like colonization all over again, except instead of taking their natural resources, we’re taking the screen time of Cameroonians and turning it into a flow of pure cash.