NBA chief sees return to China

National Basketball Association (NBA) commissioner Adam Silver said on Oct 10 that he expects his league will once more play games in China after having not done so since 2019, according to multiple media reports.

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Silver, speaking at a sports management conference at Columbia University, said he expects a China return despite no NBA games being held there since two 2019 pre-season contests were played amid controversy, following a tweet supporting freedom for Hong Kong by then Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey.

“I think we will bring back games to China at some point,” Silver said.

“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. Anybody in our league has the right to speak out on political matters.”

The NBA lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of being taken off Chinese television until 2022.