All the talk in the NBA this year has been about LeBron James, but the biggest story might be happening 12,000 kilometres from Miami.

Yao Ming, the massive Houston Rockets centre and the most famous professional athlete in China, is apparently pondering retirement.

Yao has struggled with injuries throughout his career, and his current foot injury is proving quite problematic. Although he’s planning to play for the Rockets this season, Yao has strongly hinted that if he re-injures the foot or sustains another setback, he may call it quits.

He’s already missing August’s World Championships, and has told Chinese officials he will not play in the Olympic Games in London in 2012.

While this is terrible news for Chinese basketball, it’s potentially catastrophic for the NBA.

Non-basketball people or those unfamiliar with Chinese sporting culture might not understand how popular Yao is.

He has been the focus of the NBA’s marketing campaign in China – and all of Asia – for years. Yao is mobbed everywhere he goes and his televised games are said to be watched by more than 70 per cent of the country.

He has deals with McDonald’s, Coke, Reebok, Visa and Apple, as well as a number of Chinese corporations. His international marketing power puts him up there among the worldwide sporting elite: Pele, Muhammad Ali and (pre-Rachel Uchitel) Tiger Woods.

He is also the reason (well, Yao and 1.3 billion others) the NBA closed its office in Australia and moved to China. It’s why the NBA plays exhibition games in Shanghai and Beijing, and why it has a website in Mandarin.

China is the NBA’s biggest market outside of the US, and you can see why when you look at the numbers. They’re staggering. For example:

*It’s been said that there are more basketball players in China than there are people in the United States.

*A recent surveyed showed that 83 per cent of Chinese males between 15-24 say they are NBA fans.

*More than a third of web traffic on nba.com comes from the Mandarin site.

It’s no wonder NBA China was established in 2008 to continue to push the game in the Far East. Five investors – both American and Chinese – put in $253 million to help fund it. Among the investors was Disney/ESPN, hoping to spread its tentacles even further into China.

So if Yao’s foot doesn’t cooperate, is NBA China in trouble?

Possibly. The other Chinese players who’ve made it to the NBA – Wang Zhizhi, Yi Jianlian, Sun Yue and Mengke Bateer – have not even come close to matching Yao’s star power on or off the court.

An NBA without Yao would no doubt hurt TV ratings, merchandise sales and the bottom line. It would also cool some of the nationalistic fervor.

But basketball has been played in China for more than 100 years, so the sport is not going to die.

In fact, there’s a ray of hope for David Stern and the NBA: this year for the first time, Kobe Bryant’s jersey outsold Yao’s.