No US sports league is as proud of its progressive image as the NBA. The basketball professionals are often engaged against racism, police violence and gun crime. They boycotted the state of North Carolina when the transsexual was discriminated against. NBA Superstar LeBron James regularly attacks US President Donald Trump.
No wonder: Three of four NBA players are black, no league is so diverse. She markets herself accordingly enlightened - " woke ", as this is called. Every athlete has the "right" to speak out politically, NBA boss Adam Silver said last year. The fans expected that: "Large companies have no choice today."
Unless it's about China.
The NBA's largest foreign market, it turns out, has such power over the US sports business that the league has drifted into a geopolitical crisis overnight. It's all about much more than the joy of basketball - it's about choosing between freedom of expression and profit, democracy and repression.
And the sport threatens to remain on the track.
USA TODAY Sports / REUTERS
Next to it tweeted: Rockets manager Daryl Morey
The drama started, as often, with a tweet. On Friday, Daryl Morey, the longtime manager of Houston Rockets, Texas, posted a seemingly harmless solidarity slogan with the anti-China protests in Hong Kong: "Fight for Freedom, Stand for Hong Kong."
China responded immediately. Fans and celebrities outraged each other, most in the social media. Chinese big sponsors of the Rockets jumped off. Fan products disappeared from Chinese websites, the state television CCTV stopped broadcasting two NBA games, and a NBA charity event was canceled.
The controversy falls into a highly sensitive phase of US-Chinese relations: This week, a delegation from Beijing arrives in Washington to find a way out of the trade war that is affecting the economies of both countries and has unsettled the US stock markets.
Marco Garcia AP
Crashed into the crisis: Rockets star James Harden
The NBA hurts it on a particularly sore spot. Since the eighties she is active in China. In 2018, thanks to lucrative licensing agreements with CCTV and the tech group Tencent, their basketball games attracted around 800 million viewers, more than twice the US population - which in turn generated huge sponsorship deals for the NBA.
At the same time, Chinese billionaires entered the NBA. Joe Tsai, the co-founder of online giant Alibaba, bought the Brooklyn Nets in September, becoming the first Chinese owner of a US basketball team. In the same breath, he was leafing through nearly a billion dollars for the Nets home arena, the Barclays Center.
The Rockets, one of the most popular NBA teams in China, have more than twice as many followers on the Chinese microblogging service Weibo as on Twitter. Their popularity goes back to the basketball giant Yao Ming from Shanghai, who played in Houston and now heads the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA). Ming also criticized Morey's tweet.
1 / I did not intend to join Rocket fans and friends of mine in China. I just voiced one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that.
- Daryl Morey (@dmorey) October 7, 2019Morey - who has friends in Hong Kong and was obviously surprised by the reaction - quickly put out the tweet: he did not want to offend anyone. Even Rockets star James Harden apologized. Even team owner Tilman Fertitta, a US entrepreneur who paid nearly $ 2.3 billion for the Rockets two years ago and now expects a return on investment, has publicly distanced himself.
But the quickest backwards made the NBA. She explained Morey's tweet as "unfortunate," the Chinese version was even more submissive: "We are deeply disappointed with Morey's inappropriate comments." The sports website "The Ringer" reported that it was "debating" to fire Morey as a pawn.
The NBA is not the first US organization to be caught in the crossfire. Any corporation that wants to do business in China has to come to terms, from Apple to Disney.
But the panicky back of the basketball players went back home. Politicians from both US parties criticized that the NBA bowed to Beijing. The creators of US cartoon tragedy "South Park" responded to China's own censorship with a swipe at the league: "Like the NBA, we welcome Chinese censorship in our homes and in our hearts, and we love money more than freedom."
Which is why Silver has backed down. The NBA, he said on Tuesday, stands for freedom of expression, and also Morey enjoys this right to accept the consequences. Which again triggered new protests in China.
The Brooklyn Nets are already positioning themselves as the Chinese's new favorite team. "The Rockets," team owner Tsai wrote on Facebook, "are now virtually excluded from the Chinese market." There was also a bit of satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the stars of the Brooklyn Nets and the Los Angeles Lakers arrived in Shanghai, led by LeBron James. Two friendlies are on the program.
