NBA back in China after six-year absence sparked by HK pro-democracy tweet
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Danny Wolf and Jalen Wilson of the Brooklyn Nets fight for position with Nimrod Levi of Hapoel Jerusalem B.C. during a pre-season game.
PHOTO: AFP
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MACAU – The National Basketball Association (NBA) returns to the lucrative China market this week with two pre-season games, following a six-year absence after a team official tweeted his support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
The Brooklyn Nets and the Phoenix Suns will play sell-out games on Oct 10 and 12 in Macau, a special administrative region of China.
China effectively cut ties with the league in 2019 after NBA executives stood behind then Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey.
About 125 million people play basketball in China, according to official statistics, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver has said the league lost “hundreds of millions of dollars” over the split, which included matches initially being pulled from Chinese television.
Deng Weijian, a 24-year-old student, called basketball an indispensable part of his life, saying that “even though the official broadcasters banned the NBA, I found other channels to watch it and so did the people around me”.
The NBA’s fan base in China has steadily grown since teams first played in the country in 1979, and its popularity was supercharged by the stardom of eight-time NBA All-Star Yao Ming.
The Chinese centre played for the Rockets from 2002 to 2011.
Between 2004 and 2019, 17 teams played a total of 28 pre-season games in the country.
That ended in late 2019 after Morey posted an image with the slogan “Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong” at the height of pro-democracy protests in the special administrative region.
Luo Yi, an NBA fan since the Yao Ming days, said he believed that Morey “expressed a personal viewpoint” without thinking of implications on a national or league level.
The dispute illustrated an ongoing trend of China’s consumer nationalism, where online sentiment and state media converge into “a spiral of outrage”, according to Australian National University lecturer Debby Chan.
Chinese broadcasts of NBA games eventually resumed and in 2024 the league signed a multimillion-dollar deal to stage pre-season matches in Macau.
The games this week will be held at the Venetian Arena, part of the Las Vegas Sands conglomerate controlled by the Adelson family, who are the majority ownership group in the Dallas Mavericks.
Both games sold out within a few hours, the NBA said.
Mark Dreyer, the author of a book on China’s sports industry, said the NBA’s return was never in doubt because China was a “key market”, with the league reportedly under contract to host two games annually for five years.
“It’s a smart move to go to Macau because it’s a soft landing,” he said.
Dreyer added that he believed the NBA will manage to avoid a repeat of the 2019 debacle.
“Everyone was aware of how badly the league got burnt in China. No one’s going to deliberately stir the pot,” he said. AFP
