The NBA is making a major push to connect with the next generation of basketball fans.

The league today will announce a partnership between the G League and Twitch, the world’s leading social video service that boasts 15 million daily active users and will stream up to six games per week starting on Friday (with game available on demand thereafter). This digital space is typically reserved for the passionate video game community, with the most high profile of players and commentators gaining seven-figure followings on the platform that offers the kind of interactive features not found in network programming.

The vision, it seems clear, is for the NBA to be ahead of the curve when it comes to the future of hoops programming.

“It’s a great opportunity for the G League,” Jeff Marsilio, the NBA’s vice president of global media distribution, told USA TODAY Sports. “The bigger picture here is all the innovation that this empowers us to do, and we’re actually going to turn some of that empowerment over to the fans – empower them to create their own experience through their own commentary, and let them build communities around that. So we’re really, really excited about it.”

The G League has fast become a testing ground of sorts for the NBA, with everything from rule changes to officiating experiments being implemented as a way of gathering data on outside-the-box ideas. So while the NBA is only in the second season of a nine-year, $24 billion television rights deal with ESPN and Turner, this partnership is somewhat of a litmus test when it comes to the next wave of possibilities regarding the fan experience.

“Obviously with the (ESPN and TNT) ratings up as much as they are, in the double digits, everybody is very happy with those partnerships, and apparently the fans are too because they’re watching in record numbers,” Marsilio said. “That said, I think we’re always looking ahead, and we’re always trying to stay up with the demands of the fan. And that is very much at the heart of this partnership, to try new things, see what might work, and think about whether we might bring them to those other leagues – the NBA, WNBA, the 2KLeague (the NBA’s e-sports venture), whatever it might be in the future.”

The incentive here, as Marsilio explained, is to engage with younger fans in the kind of way that hooks them for good.

“Roughly half of our (NBA) fans in the U.S. are under 35, and that makes us the league with the youngest average age among its fans of any U.S. sport,” Marsilio said. “In fact, if you go to the G League, nearly half of their fans are under 18, so it’s an even younger (fanbase).

“(With the Twitch deal), you can actually be learning while you’re watching, and become the expert that you are in all those various video games. This is the hypothesis that we’re testing with this partnership. They’re the kind of fanbase that will take the time to learn something that might not be so easy to learn at first. They’re not intimidated by steep learning curves. And that will translate – I hope – to G League.”

And therein lies the beauty of the Twitch platform, which will feature G League games that include statistical graphics and, at times, direct communication between selected viewers and commentators or players.

“(NBA commissioner) Adam (Silver) has talked about the fact that, over the last couple of decades, maybe with the important exception of HD, the presentation of our game hasn’t changed that dramatically, and yet consumer expectations and habits have changed a lot in that time,” Marsilio said. “And so it’s going to be really fascinating and important for us to experiment with the presentation of the G League on Twitch, see what new features, what new forms of presentation might work. And who knows – if those succeed – if there’s an opportunity to take those to the other leagues that we have.”

Follow USA TODAY Sports' Sam Amick on Twitter @Sam_Amick