As photos from today’s U.S. men’s basketball team news conference prove, the NBA and its stars are as globally branded as any league and any group of athletes. Wherever sports journalists live in the world — and presumably their readers, listeners and viewers — the Kobe and LeBron brands are magnetic.

For a sport that only has 12 men’s teams here, five nations chose basketball players to carry their flags, including Argentina’s Manu Ginobili, Russia’s Andrei Kirilenko, Germany’s Dirk Nowitzki, Lithuania’s Sarunas Jasikevicius and, of course, China’s national sports hero Yao Ming. Four of the five are key NBA assets, and Jasikevicius was a former NBA player before returning to Europe to play.

Ever since the 1992 Dream Team broke the barrier, I’ve often heard from friends and casual sports fans, “Why does the NBA have to be in the Olympics?” (During the Winter Games it’s, “Why don’t we bring the college kids back like in Lake Placid? Why do we need the NHL players?”)

Why? Because it’s good for the Olympics — it legitimizes the event as relevant and recognizable and preserves the corpus of the event while subsidizing the taekwondos and modern pentathlons. It provides name recognition to a quadrennial event that regularly must reinvent stars every four years.

And, of course, it’s great for the NBA and key sponsors of the league and its players.

Walk around Beijing, see the signage for, especially, Coke and Reebok. Yao is king because of his NBA links and, now, his play for the host nation of these Olympics.

Friday night at the Bird’s Nest, the Team USA guys — all NBAers — all seemed to be in attendance at the long and sweaty opening ceremony. Kobe Bryant nodded politely to the young attendants holding Olympic flags as he walked by them. Like any good point guard, Chris Paul was the last man in Team USA’s long march, making sure everyone else was in position.

But Pau Gasol, a Bryant teammate with the Lakers, spoke on his cell phone as he strutted in with Team Spain. Bad form, sir. Bad form.

Actually, it was like a Lakers game Friday, but it wasn’t Jack Nicholson, Dyan Cannon, Eddie Murphy and Leonardo DiCaprio. It was Bush, Putin, Karzai and Sarkozy. They obviously wanted to see Kobe, too.