Go to any street corner in the Philippines. Any village. Any beach. Even a church. You’re likely to see a basketball jersey.

“It’s often described as a religion,” Carlo Roy Singson, the managing director of N.B.A. Philippines, said in an interview.

Indeed, basketball is ingrained in Filipino culture and has been for more than a century.

The sport’s permeation of a country of about 105 million began in the late 1800s, when Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States in 1898 after the Spanish-American War. A large facet of the introduction of the fledgling game was Christian missionaries, who were part of the Y.M.C.A. The game’s inventor, James Naismith, conceived of the sport at what was then known as the International Y.M.C.A. Training School in Springfield, Mass. To take a round object and throw it into a peach hoop, as Naismith pictured it, could build morale and character. Soon after he invented the game, missionaries began spreading it around the world, particularly in the Far East and the Philippines, in United States-controlled areas — a kind of sports imperialism.