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Hong Kong (CNN Business) - Several Chinese companies are suspending ties with the Houston Rockets after the general manager of the American basketball team expressed support for protests in favor of democracy in Hong Kong.
Daryl Morey triggered a firestorm in China over the weekend when he posted an image on Twitter that said: "Fight for freedom, stand up with Hong Kong." The tensions between Hong Kong and Beijing, which controls the former British colony, have been fueled by months of political unrest.
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China's reaction was not long in coming. The Chinese Basketball Association said Sunday that it would suspend all cooperation with the Texas-based team. The president of the association is Yao Ming, he is a former Rockets player.
China's consulate general in Houston also urged the team to "clarify and correct errors immediately" in a statement on Sunday.
The alliances of the NBA team in China were questioned. CCTV 5, the sports channel of China's main state broadcaster, announced that it would suspend the transmission of the Houston Rockets events on television.
And Tencent Sports said it would suspend live streaming for the Houston Rockets games, as well as news about the team. Tencent is the exclusive digital partner of the NBA in China. According to the companies, almost 500 million people in China watched NBA programming on Tencent platforms during the last season. They recently signed a five-year extension of that association.
The sponsors also distanced themselves from the Houston Rockets. The Li-Ning company, which manufactures sportswear, and the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank said over the weekend that they would suspend cooperation with the team.
The NBA expresses regret
The violent reaction provoked responses from the NBA and Morey. The NBA said Monday it recognizes that Morey's views "have deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China, which is unfortunate."
"While Daryl has made it clear that his tweet does not represent the Rockets or the NBA, the values of the league support people who are educated and share their views on issues important to them," said the director of NBA communications, Mike Bass, in a statement, which was published on the Chinese social media website Weibo. "We have great respect for the history and culture of China and we hope that sports and the NBA can be used as a unifying force to save cultural divisions and bring people together."
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Morey said Monday in a series of tweets that he was speaking on his own behalf.
"I did not intend for my tweet to offend Rockets fans and my friends in China," said Morey. “I was simply expressing a thought, based on an interpretation, of a complicated event. Since that tweet I have had many opportunities to listen and consider other perspectives. ”
Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta tried to distance the team from politics. The team is in Tokyo for a series of preseason games against the Toronto Raptors this week.
2 / I have always appreciated the significant support our Chinese fans and sponsors have provided and I would hope that those who are upset will know that offending or misunderstanding them was not my intention. My tweets are my own and in no way represent the Rockets or the NBA.
- Daryl Morey (@dmorey) October 7, 2019
Morey “DOESN'T speak for @HoustonRockets. Our presence in Tokyo has to do with the international promotion of @NBA and we are NOT a political organization, ”Fertitta said on Saturday on Twitter.
Big business
Basketball is a big issue in China. Its popularity exploded in part due to Yao, who was born in Shanghai and played for the Rockets from 2002 to 2011. Approximately 300 million people in the country, almost a fifth of its population, now practice sports, according to the Chinese Association of Basketball.
There is much at stake for the NBA in particular. It is the most watched professional sport in the country, according to Tencent. The number of people who watch NBA games on Tencent's streaming services in China has almost tripled in the last four years. And during the 2017-2018 season, more than 600 million people watched NBA games on Chinese television networks.
The NBA does not regularly publish how much revenue it generates from China. But the Chinese NBA, which established in 2008 to manage NBA-related events, is worth more than $ 4 billion, NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum told Forbes in an interview last year.
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The NBA also partners with Chinese companies that sell authorized NBA products, including sportswear, beer, dairy drinks and electronic products. Partners include Alibaba, Li-Ning and Mengniu Dairy.
The sport and its stars are also popular in social networks. The league has 180 million followers on Chinese social networks, according to NBA China. And the star players also have many followers: Kobe Bryant, the former Los Angeles Lakers legend who retired in 2016, has 8.25 million followers on Weibo.
Brock Silvers, managing director of investment firm Kaiyuan Capital, said the league's response was quick and predictable, given the politicization of Hong Kong.
"But a league recognized for its marketing knowledge may be taking an uncharacteristic turn," he added. “The NBA response reflexively expressed an extreme political correctness, one with which NBA players and fans may not agree. And at some point there may be a broader reaction that leaves the NBA seemingly out of touch and makes it less entertaining. ”
Controversy in the United States
The NBA response has already been criticized by several American politicians.
"It is clear that the NBA is more interested in money than in human rights," said Senator Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, on Twitter. “The NBA leans toward Beijing to protect its results and disavow those with the temerity of allying with #standwithHongKong. Shameful!"
Beto O'Rourke, a Texas Democrat running for the presidential nomination of the party in 2020, called the NBA response "shameful."
"The only thing the NBA should apologize for is its clear priority of human rights gains," he wrote on Twitter.
Joe Tsai, executive vice president of Chinese tech giant Alibaba and owner of the NBA franchise Brooklyn Nets, tried to calm the tensions.
“The NBA has been very progressive in allowing players and other constituents a platform to talk about the problems,” Tsai wrote in a long Facebook post, before explaining why it is a problem to support what he described as a “movement. separatist ”in a territory controlled by China
“Chinese citizens remain united when it comes to China's territorial integrity and the country's sovereignty over their homeland. This issue is not negotiable, ”he said.
Tsai also partially defended Morey, while urging Chinese fans to "keep the faith" in the NBA.
"I am sure he is a good general manager of the NBA, and I will take his subsequent apology seriously that he was not as well informed as he should have been," he said. "But it will take a long time to fix the damage this incident has caused."
CNN's Yong Xiong contributed to this report.
China Hong Kong NBA
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