NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Thursday he expects his league will once more play games in China after having not done so since 2019, according to multiple media reports.
Silver, speaking at Columbia University in a sports management conference, said he expects a China return despite no NBA games there since two 2019 pre-season contests were played in 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.”
The NBA lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of the NBA being taken off Chinese television until 2022.
Since then, the league has grown globally in other nations, playing pre-season games in Abu Dhabi earlier this month with Emirates Airlines sponsoring the NBA Cup, the league’s in-season tournament.
Silver said the NBA tries to make a positive contribution to nations beyond sport.
“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,” Silver said.
