(Bloomberg) -- NBA teams will return to play in the Chinese market for the first time since 2019, when a social media post during pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong caused backlash from local fans and broadcasters.
The Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns will play two preseason games in Macau next October, according to an NBA statement on Friday. The Nets are owned by billionaire Joe Tsai, a co-founder of the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
The NBA regularly played games in China from 2004 to 2019, with the country marked as a key market.
But in 2019, a tweet by Daryl Morey, then the Houston Rockets general manager, in support of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong spurred backlash from Chinese fans and corporate sponsors.
State broadcaster CCTV suspended showings of NBA contests for about a year and internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., which had just signed a $1.5 billion deal to stream NBA games online in China, halted the service for about a week. Commissioner Adam Silver said that the league stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars from the blackout.
CCTV said at the time that they were “strongly dissatisfied and opposed Adam’s claim to support Morey’s rights of free expression.”
Silver has stood firm in allowing NBA players and coaches freedom of expression as long as they stick to league rules. In 2021, Boston Celtics player Enes Kanter denounced President Xi Jinping as a “brutal dictator” and criticized China’s rule over Tibet in a social media message that contained a nearly three-minute video. Tencent swiftly removed all live-streaming for upcoming Celtics games.
Basketball is one of the most popular sports in China, and the first NBA game was broadcast there in 1986 on state network CCTV. The NBA’s image in China was bolstered further after 7-foot-6-inch center Yao Ming was drafted in 2002.
Following the bust-up in 2019, the NBA has been pushing its international expansion elsewhere. It has held in-season games in Paris since 2020, while the Celtics played preseason games in Abu Dhabi in October as part of the NBA’s third annual trip to the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
The NBA is considering opening a regional office in the Middle East, one of the few areas it doesn’t have an on-the-ground presence, Bloomberg has reported.
The Macau games will be held in the The Venetian Arena, which is owned and managed by the Las Vegas Sands Corp. Miriam Adelson, the controlling shareholder of Las Vegas Sands, bought a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks in 2023.
Macau, like Hong Kong, is a special administrative region of China.
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