Nike's J.Kidd still has commercial value

Despite his well-publicized domestic problems, Nike still thinks Jason Kidd has commercial value.

How do we know this? Well, we got another casting call this week (recall the Jerry Rice and LeBron James casting calls).

Poor Man's Commish was a little too under the weather to get this out in time, but the fact remains, we got this email from a reputable casting agency earlier in the week...

"...a Nike ad featuring J.Kidd in Oakland/SF area. We're looking for other players [men, age 20-30] to be in it with him. It pays $2000.00 if selected and we'd like to interview those interested ASAP."

First guy I would've called would have been Hook Mitchell, who called last month to check in after dropping off the map for about a year. Oh, but he's like 36 by now.

Anyways, I guess J.Kidd still has some staying power? Been awhile since his original Air Zooms.

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LeBron's global strategy now hinges on playing 1-on-1 with Chinese kid (from Chicago?!)

Our beloved beacon of basketball brouhaha, TrueHoop.com, reported earlier on Tuesday in a line item that LeBron James just "announced" a promotional deal with Microsoft, so I had no choice but to drop everything and embark on a writeup which I was hoping could wait until the holidays.

I put "announced" in quotation marks because this is actually pretty old news. Microsoft has sponsored LBJ's Bike-A-Thon in the past and there's even an insightful transcription (scroll to the middle of the page) of LeBron's budding relationship with Microsoft, through a dialogue between Maverick Carter and a Microsoft executive at an advertising conference not too long ago in late September.

In fact, as you might remember from our dreamleague-wide posts (before we had this blog) on Nov. 27 entitled Chinese Youth with Skillz for LeBron Commercial (scroll almost all the way down), LeBron has been scouring the country for a male Chinese kid age 10-14 with good basketball skills to go one-on-one in his forthcoming commercial with Microsoft...

Read the rest of the story (UPDATED 1/15/2007)

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