Playing with the Big Boys covers Filipino basketball in a wider range of competitive and comparative alignments. Primarily, it traces the origins of the country’s favorite game to the history and legacies of American colonialism. Moreover, the book extends the discussion beyond native-foreign, colony-empire, and local-global juxtapositions to situate imperialism in the context of regionalism and Asianization.

The world is a major league for this book. While there are championships that are dominated by empires and superpowers, there are also countless derbies, international rivalries, regional crowns, and other real, imagined, and symbolic competitions that make basketball an important sport for many countries, including the Philippines.