It was a victory celebrated across the world, but nowhere more so than in a Fifth Avenue office in New York. At the headquarters of the National Basketball Association (NBA), they did not just welcome Barack Obama as President-elect of the United States, but as an exciting new star in the world of slam dunk.

We wait to discover how Obama will resolve the world’s financial crisis, when he will withdraw troops from Iraq and whether he can bring lasting peace to the Middle East. But we already know that he is intent on installing a basketball court at the White House so that he can wind down the way he loves best — by shooting a few hoops.

Even down a telephone line from the Big Apple, you can tell that the NBA’s hierarchy could not be filled with more anticipation had it just stumbled across the next Michael “Air” Jordan. “The way we saw it, a vote for Obama was a vote for basketball,” Adam Silver, the deputy commissioner, said. His equation is simple. Obama loves basketball. And, for now at least, the world loves Obama.

With a global reach greater than Jordan’s and a popularity rating to outstrip Kobe Bryant or any of the big names of the NBA, Obama could be the best thing that has happened to his sport, Silver believes, since James A. Naismith hung up two peach baskets in a school hall in 1891 to occupy some children in the winter and invented a sport that has spread from Springfield, Massachusetts, to China, Brazil and, in fits and starts, to Britain. An exhibition match in October between the New Jersey Nets and the Miami Heat quickly sold out at the O2 Arena in East London. It was successful enough for David Stern, the NBA commissioner, to say: “It’s fair to say we will see a minimum of one regular-season game here in the UK before 2012.”

The time-frame was deliberate, with the 2012 Games representing a huge opportunity for basketball in Britain, a fact confirmed when the sport became the biggest winner this week as UK Sport divided up its Olympic funding. Basketball’s increase from £3.69 million to £8.75 million over the next three years was the largest percentage gain, causing ructions among its rivals.

“I played basketball, it’s my sport and I love it, and I can tell you there is absolutely no hope of the Great Britain team winning an Olympic medal in the next 20 years,” Scott McCarthy, the chief executive of the British Judo Association and an American by birth, said. “They have to beat the USA, Russia, Spain, Serbia — in fact, the top 12 teams — and even if they compete at the next six Olympiads they will not beat them.”

History is not on basketball’s side, given that Team GB have competed in the sport only once before, at the London Games of 1948. But there has been a concerted effort for 2012, a recruitment drive similar to Jack Charlton’s scouring of passports when he was manager of the Ireland football team. So far it has netted Luol Deng, a star with the Chicago Bulls who spent some of his youth in South London, and he has been trying to recruit Ben Gordon, a team-mate, among others. The NBA is giving as much backing to this experiment as possible, with globalisation high on Stern’s agenda.

How much the league can look to Obama to spread the word is debatable, given that he may have more pressing concerns, such as fighting terrorism. But the NBA is hoping that the President-elect will continue to play as he travels, perhaps even using the game to break the ice.

“Sport has been used as diplomacy very successfully in the past,” Silver said. “The ping-pong diplomacy between President Nixon and the Chinese administration [in the 1970s] comes to mind. Basketball is very much an export business from the USA, increasingly seen around the world, in China and elsewhere. It is viewed as a piece of Americana and also now in terms of what President-elect Obama stands for.”

If Obama could be great for basketball, the sport has been pretty good to him, too. He was regarded by some in the early days of his campaign as unknown and aloof, but basketball helped to sell him to the American public as “a regular guy”. In the US, politicians have generally been associated with more elitist sports: John F. Kennedy with sailing, John Kerry with windsurfing, while Bill Clinton was renowned for being creative with his scoring on the golf course. Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon played American football at college, but none brought basketball to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Obama will not only be the first black President but also the first to champion the most urban of American sports, synonymous with street culture in its fusion of sport, fashion and music. Basketball is the sport that David Beckham has embraced in Los Angeles, where he sits courtside near Jack Nicholson, Spike Lee and half of Hollywood. It is the sport into which Jay-Z, the music mogul, has invested, buying a chunk of the Nets. Asked how he would pass election night, Obama was tapping into millions of American homes when he responded: “I dream of playing basketball.”

It helps Obama that he can do more than talk a good game. Sport can be dangerous territory for politicians, a place where fakery is quickly exposed. It is hard to imagine Gordon Brown or David Cameron on the sports pitch, even in their youth. At the Beijing Olympics in August, Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, could not wave a flag without drawing guffaws, but Obama looks as if he belongs on a basketball court, even now.

It has been that way since he was a boy in Hawaii and felt isolated by his colour. “At least on the basketball court I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own,” Obama wrote in Dreams from My Father. “It was there that I would make my closest white friends, on turf where blackness couldn’t be a disadvantage.”

Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, we can follow his career from high school and watch him laying up shots, replete with painfully tight shorts and an Afro haircut borrowed from Michael Jackson. He wears the No 23 jersey long before Jordan, basketball’s greatest player, made the number so cool that Beckham copied it at Real Madrid and Los Angeles Galaxy.

Basketball was a running theme through Obama’s election campaign. It became a ritual to play on the morning of primaries and, when he failed to do so before the New Hampshire vote, the subsequent loss convinced his camp that time had to be set aside for matches. These games, involving aides and longstanding “buddies”, included a two-hour pick-up on the day of his election to the White House.

Shooting a three-pointer at rallies on the electoral road became a party piece, a test of nerve that Obama regularly passed, whether in front of troops in Kuwait or in a school gym in Indiana. “That’s my President!!!!” one excited visitor to YouTube writes of watching Obama nail a shot. “We got a ballin’ President!” writes another.

At 6ft 2in and whippet-thin at 47, Obama moves with grace but also with purpose. He is said to make the most of his left-handedness, faking to the right and veering to the left to catch opponents off guard. And he is not averse to on-court sledging. That he can play the game at all can only have helped a black man with an Indonesian-Kenyan-Hawaiian background trying to sell himself to regular Joes in Idaho and Iowa.

“He did particularly well in the election among a young demographic,” Silver said. “He won by 6 per cent overall, but among 18 to 29-year-olds he won by 34 per cent. They are the core fan-base of the NBA.” And here was a politician who could do a high-five on court and not look as though he was a middle-aged geek trying to be cool (like William Hague at the Notting Hill Carnival in his baseball cap, for example).

Obama’s street cred was further boosted when he was endorsed by many of the leading players in the US, for whom politics is not necessarily a regular locker-room conversation. LeBron James, the star of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the US Olympic gold medal-winning team in Beijing, attended a rally, wore Obama T-shirts and contributed $20,000 (about £13,700) to the campaign. “He’s very smart and just very cool and collected,” James said. “It seems like he would never let any situation get to him. I kind of like that.”

With Obama’s credentials backed by the world’s best player, the wider question is how the NBA can make capital out of the fact that the Commander-in-Chief loves its sport. “I can’t see us trying to necessarily exploit it in a marketing way, but just in terms of the imagery and the values of the sport,” Silver said. “It is about teamwork, dedication, fitness, bringing people together. Those are Barack Obama’s values.”

Any association with Obama can only help at a time when basketball has foundered a little in its attempts at globalisation. Although the NBA continues to make inroads in China, where it has made a huge push for a share of that rapidly expanding market by assisting with the development of arenas and plans to share management of the professional league, attempts to break into Europe are stop-start. Over here, there is no Yao Ming, the 7ft 6in sporting icon of China who carried his nation’s flag at the Olympics.

The London Games will draw attention to the sport, but the NBA’s hopes of setting up a European division with teams in London, Berlin and Barcelona remain a dream. The construction of American-style venues such as the O2 is a boon, but the NBA must establish whether players are happy to be drafted to Europe and if the draft complies with European Commission employment laws.

Most significant, it will need more evidence that fans would flock to 40-plus games in a regular season and not only one-off exhibitions. As Silver said, it is all well and good to throw money at the top end of the game and the Olympic project for 2012, but long-term sustainability comes from building from the bottom. “We have to become part of the school curriculum,” he said. “We know we’ve got to start getting kids to bounce balls and not just kick them.”

Obama or not, that is the hard part.