The 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 Friday and Sunday in Macau, a special administrative region of China close to Hong Kong.
China, the world’s second-biggest economy, 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 needs to learn a lesson, which is to avoid sensitive topics and let basketball get back to being a competition of skill,” Deng said.
The league’s return coincides with shaky US-China relations under US President Donald Trump, with American corporations hoping to entice Chinese consumers while fending off political scrutiny at home.
Silver said in 2019 that one of the NBA’s long-held values was to support freedom of expression.
“We rely on the US State Department for guidance everywhere we engage fans around the world, including in China and more than 200 other countries and territories,” NBA deputy commissioner and chief operating officer Mark Tatum told AFP in a written reply this week.
Asked if the NBA still supported members of its community to voice opinions on China, Tatum replied, “Yes.”
The NBA’s fanbase 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.
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 Chinese finance hub.
Mark Dreyer, the author of a book on China’s sports industry, said the incident was a “perfect storm” made worse by how the league issued differing statements in Chinese and English.
“Fans in the US thought that they were being far too obliging towards the Chinese government… (and) the Chinese side thought they weren’t being deferential enough,” Dreyer said.
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 spat 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 netizens’ criticisms were reinforced by state media” during the Morey incident, said Chan, who researches Chinese economic statecraft.
Chinese broadcasts of NBA games eventually resumed and last year 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.
Macau is the only place in China where casino gambling is legal.
Both games sold out within a few hours, the NBA said.
Dreyer 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 said 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.
But the lecturer Chan said it was “challenging to ascertain the shifting red lines of Chinese nationalist consumers”, pointing to recent examples of brands rushing to placate Beijing.
Construction worker He Xixuan, 26, said “politics should not be a part of basketball”, adding that the sport could be a way for Chinese and Americans to find common ground.
“If everyone is talking about sports and not national politics, that can be good for both sides,” he said.
