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The NBA is staging its first games in China since a row in 2019 over protests in Hong Kong, ending a rift between the US basketball league and one of its most important markets.
The Brooklyn Nets and the Phoenix Suns are set to play two games on Friday and Sunday in Macau, the semi-autonomous gambling hub on China’s southern coast.
No NBA games have occurred in China since 2019, when Hong Kong erupted into protests after a proposed bill to allow extradition, including to mainland China. Pre-season games were cancelled after then Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of the protesters and NBA commissioner Adam Silver defended Morey’s actions.
The NBA’s return coincides with a deal signed with the cloud business of Alibaba, the US-listed ecommerce giant, to “enhance live game viewing and other fan engagement experiences”, Alibaba Cloud said on Thursday. Matches are broadcast in China by Tencent, with whom the league last year extended its deal to 2027.
For the NBA, the pre-season games are a critical opportunity to reconnect with a country it first visited in 1979 and that has since grown to become its biggest market outside the US. It estimates that 300mn people in China play the sport.
“There’s fans everywhere,” said Andrew Spalter, founder of East Goes Global, a marketing consultancy working with seven NBA teams in China, of the scene in Macau this week.
Some of the league’s best-known stars have visited the mainland ahead of the games. “China’s basketball scene continues to amaze me,” said LeBron James in an article in the state-run People’s Daily last month, adding that he had trained with the national youth team in Chengdu.
Famed three-point specialist Stephen Curry visited Chongqing for a training camp in August, where his image was broadcast in lights over the city’s skyscrapers along with his Chinese name, Ku Li.
“In my work in the NBA, the busiest time of year was post-NBA season to pre-NBA season,” said Greg Stolt, a former NBA executive in China, adding that mascots, referees and other league representatives would be visiting China “every week”. “It looks like this summer is kind of back to that.”
The two games will take place in The Venetian, the casino resort owned by the Adelson family, which also owns the Dallas Mavericks, ahead of the NBA’s opening games in the US this month.
It is just one of several corporate expansion pushes by major American brands in the mainland — from Walmart’s Sam’s Club warehouses to Nike — which point to an appetite for growth in China even as a trade dispute between Washington and Beijing drags on.
The Brooklyn Nets are owned by Joe Tsai, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba, who recently launched an annual tournament across east Asian universities to capitalise on enthusiasm for the sport.
Basketball exploded in popularity in China after the success of homegrown star Yao Ming in the early 2000s. “That was kind of a game-changer,” said Stolt. This weekend, fans will be hoping to catch a glimpse of Zeng Fanbo, a Chinese player who signed with the Brooklyn Nets this summer.
In a sign of the sport’s role in diplomacy during a period of tense relations, Yao delivered a speech at the American Chamber of Commerce’s 110th anniversary of its presence in Shanghai this year.
“One of my Chinese friends asked: ‘Why [is the] basketball hoop 305cm, why not 300, why not 310?’” he told the assembled executives. “Then one of my American friends answered: ‘It’s because that’s 10ft.’ Sometimes the answer is that simple — you have to just step in the other side.”
