Five years after fallout, Adam Silver believes NBA will return to China

NEW YORK — Five years after the NBA’s last game in China, commissioner Adam Silver believes the league will return to the country at some point. The NBA has not played a game there since 2019, when two preseason games were held in the shadow of controversy after a tweet by then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey in support of freedom for Hong Kong.

“I think we will bring back games to China at some point,” Silver said Thursday at a sports management conference at Columbia University. “We had a well-known incident there pre-pandemic with a tweet and China’s government took us off the air for a period of time. We accepted that. We stood by our values.”

That seemed unlikely a few years ago. The NBA had made China a key component of its international strategy but that was upended following Morey’s tweet. NBA games were taken off TV there.

The league, Silver said, lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of the blowback to Morey’s tweet. NBA games returned to the airwaves in China in 2022.

The NBA has since made inroads elsewhere globally. It has forged a growing relationship with the United Arab Emirates and played exhibition games in Abu Dhabi in consecutive years. The NBA Cup is now sponsored by Emirates Airlines.

However, human rights groups have criticized the NBA’s relationship with countries such as the UAE and China.

Silver said that the NBA makes a decision whether to go to countries based not just on business, but also on what it thinks the NBA can accomplish.

“We make a decision as to whether we’re making a positive contribution to those societies,” Silver said Thursday.

“We’re happy to deal directly with the issues. Nothing these days is completely clean,” Silver continued. “We wouldn’t say that it’s not fair to be critical or have contrary points of view. We came to the decision collectively as a league that by expanding our game internationally, that it’s positive and it’s part of our mission to create health and wellness around the sport of basketball.”