It’s chaos over there in the States, right? Owners and general managers ricocheting around the country chasing LeBron James and the other NBA free agents as of 12:01 EDT Thursday, trying to bundle up enough cash to sign Bron-Bron and all those other guys.

We here at The National, in the United Arab Emirates, are interested in this. Really. We are. Not to the degree we are interested in the World Cup or club soccer or cricket or Formula One racing. But most people here have heard of the NBA and/or this LeBron person (moreso than Kobe; just sayin’, L.A. fans).

And with July 1 approaching, I offered to do a quick scene-setter for our multicultural sports section, so we can get on the record, and here is how I attempted to explain this to a not-quite-rapt audience.

And, to make it a bit more accessible:

I put together two lists: Top five free agents and top five potential destinations. We dedicated a page to it, which will seem strange to aficianados of the English suite of sports but, then, buckets of rugby seems off to many of our readers, too.

Of all American sports, the NBA is easily the most digestible on the world scene, including here in Arabia. The game is fairly simple. It is fast. It features amazingly gifted athletes. That resonates anywhere you go. I have seen pickup basketball games in Hong Kong. Basketball is one of the top two sports in the Philippines. It is somewhere down the line, here in the UAE, but hoops is known to exist.

American football generates a sort of fleeting fascination because of the violence of it, and because much of the world seems to have been told that football is a window into the soul of the United States. Big, fast, almost impenetrable and, yes, violent.

Baseball hardly registers outside specific enclaves (the Dominican, Japan, Korea, and we’re just about done). It is seen as hopelessly complex and stupendously boring; even cricket fans are convinced of this, and cricket makes The National Pastime look like baseball on speed — which it could have been, in the 1990s.

Anyway, the Summer of LeBron. We are observing it over here, too.