Adam Silver believes that the NBA will return for games in China one day, despite controversy surrounding the league playing there when teams visited in 2019.
NBA Will Return To China
Adam Silver was speaking at Columbia University this week in a sports management conference where he addressed speculation that the league could return to China for games for the first time since 2019.
There was an incident during the 2019 games with a controversial tweet, in which Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey caused offense with his opinions on Honk Kong politics.
“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.”
Today at the @Columbia_SPS sports conference @NBA commissioner Adam Silver said “I think we will bring games back to China,” and added that the league stood by its values after the Daryl Morey situation a few years back. @novy_williams was in attendance pic.twitter.com/iWHW9G1WdN
— Sportico (@Sportico) October 10, 2024
After the controversy, China opted to blacklist the NBA nationwide and it wasn’t shown on television for almost two years. The ban on NBA broadcasting did eventually end in 2022 but China still has a frosty relationship with the NBA.
“We’re happy to deal directly with the issues. Nothing these days is completely clean. We came to the decision collectively as a league that by expanding our game internationally.
“It’s part of our mission to create health and wellness around the sport of basketball.”
Although the NBA hasn’t returned to China since the 2019 issues, they have managed to expand into other countries outside the US such as Mexico, France, and Abu Dhabi.
The NBA has still been involved with China in the last couple of years, with the national team taking on the Kings, Hornets, and Spurs in the 2024 Summer League.
It seems like only a matter of time before the NBA returns to Asia to play some games, with a huge untapped market of fans in China looking to watch the best players in the world.
