Today, our English lesson with Nicolas Batum of the Portland Trail Blazers goes live on English, baby! I didn’t fully realize how widespread NBA fans are until we were in China and I saw a lot of NBA magazines on the magazine racks and talked to a lot of basketball fans. We’re really excited to have a video interview with an NBA player on the site, especially an international player and one as friendly and likable as Batum. Here’s the lesson video:

You might notice that the dunk doesn’t exactly “crush” like Nicolas says it should. That’s because we had to work with the footage we had after our interview ended suddenly. I’ll let John Canzano of 95.5 the Game explain the full story. Some of this conversation also appears in this English lesson, which our users seemed to find pretty amusing.

But, of course, Nicolas can crush with the best of them when he sets out to do so. The announcer on this video clip even uses the word “crush” to describe this epic dunk.

Image by Bruce Ely from last night’s game. See the rest of the slideshow here.