FILE – Chinese fans react during a preseason NBA basketball game between the Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Lakers at the Mercedes Benz Arena in Shanghai, China, Oct. 10, 2019. (AP Photo, File)
The NBA is returning to China next season, striking a deal to play preseason games there more than five years after the league was effectively banned over Commissioner Adam Silver not punishing Daryl Morey for tweeting support of anti-government protesters in Hong Kong.
An agreement will be announced on Friday, said a person who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because neither the NBA nor Chinese officials have spoken publicly on the matter.
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The Brooklyn Nets and the Phoenix Suns will play in China’s gambling hub of Macao on Oct. 10, 2025, and again two days later, the person said, adding there are plans for two more preseason games in China in 2026.
The teams will play at Macao’s Venetian Arena, which is owned by the Las Vegas Sands Corp. — which is a casino operator there as well. Sands president and chief operating officer Patrick Dumont became governor of the Dallas Mavericks late last year after his family acquired the team.
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The Nets are owned by Joe Tsai, the chairman of Chinese tech giant Alibaba.
There will be an NBA presence at that Macao arena this weekend: Basketball Hall of Famers Tony Parker, Ray Allen and Tracy McGrady, along with former NBA standouts Stephon Marbury, DeMarcus Cousins and Cuttino Mobley, will headline a celebrity game on Saturday.
FILE – Employees watch a live broadcast of Game 5 of the NBA finals at an NBA store in Beijing, Oct. 10, 2020. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
It’s all part of a long series of moves toward some sort of return to normalcy between China and the league. The NBA, on some level, has been welcomed back for a while: Miami’s Jimmy Butler, who has an endorsement deal with Chinese apparel company Li-Ning, has toured the country and drawn large crowds in each of the last two offseasons, while Golden State’s Stephen Curry and Sacramento’s De’Aaron Fox drew enormous crowds when they visited in September.
Then in October, Silver said he thought the league would “bring games back to China at some point.”
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The geopolitical rift started in October 2019 when Morey, then the general manager of the Houston Rockets and now GM of the Philadelphia 76ers, tweeted support for anti-government protesters in Hong Kong. The tweet was deleted quickly, but the fallout lasted years and Beijing was clearly displeased by Silver supporting Morey’s right to speak out on the issue.
“If that’s the consequences of us adhering to our values, we still feel it’s critically important we adhere to those values,” Silver said at the time.
The timing of the tweet was particularly awkward, given that the Nets and Los Angeles Lakers were in China at the time for two games. The games were played — largely in silence with fans in attendance, many taping over the NBA logos on the jerseys they wore — and even without customary pregame and postgame news conferences.
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The NBA was criticized by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. for playing and for not saying more about China’s human rights record.
In large part because Silver did not sanction Morey to China’s liking, no NBA games were shown on CCTV, China’s state broadcaster, for one year after that tweet. The end of the 2020 NBA Finals was shown on CCTV, which began showing games in earnest again in 2022. NBA games were available to Chinese fans on the streaming service Tencent, another of the league’s broadcast partners.
The league said the rift cost up to $400 million in lost revenue in the year that followed, and that figure surely continued rising. But there were steps toward a reconciliation along the way; NBA legend and Yao Ming went to the U.S. for the memorial service for commissioner emeritus David Stern in January 2020, a move viewed at the time as a mutual sign that the league and China wanted to mend fences. That was followed by China publicly thanking the NBA in February 2020 — when what became the COVID-19 pandemic was in its earliest days — for sending more than $1 million in medical supplies to assist coronavirus relief efforts there.
The league has played a preseason game in Macao once before, with Orlando beating Cleveland there in 2007. The Magic, on that same trip, also played a Chinese all-star team in Macao. And in 2008, USA Basketball played exhibitions in Macao before the Beijing Olympics.
“The game of basketball around here, the fans respect the game so much,” then-Cavaliers star LeBron James said after playing in Macao in 2007. “It’s great to see that.”
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Macao — a former Portuguese colony that was returned to Chinese rule in 1999 — is the only place in China where casino gambling is legal. Beijing has called for the city to diversify its gambling-reliant economy, with hopes that it can grow tourism and be a bridge for trade between China and Portuguese-speaking countries.