The NBA will return to China for the first time since 2019 with two pre-season games in Macau between the Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns next October, ESPN reported Thursday.
No NBA games have been held in China since two 2019 pre-season contests were played there amid controversy following a tweet from then Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey in support of protests in Hong Kong.
ESPN, citing unnamed sources, said the relationship between the NBA and China had improved with the aid of NBA China chief executive Michael Ma, who was hired in 2020.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said at a sports management conference in October that he thought the league would “bring back games to China at some point.”
“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,” Silver said. “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.
ESPN reported that the games in Macau will be played at the Venetian Arena, part of the Las Vegas Sands conglomerate controlled by the Adelson family — the majority ownership group in the Dallas Mavericks.
China is home to a huge basketball fanbase. From 2004 to 2019, 17 teams played a total of 28 pre-season games in China.
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