The NBA will return to China. The league is set to play two preseason games there next year, which would mark its first action there since 2019. The Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns intend to play two games in Macao in October 2025, according to multiple reports.
The league has not played games there in five years after a tweet by then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey that supported protests for freedom in Hong Kong. NBA games were then taken off air in the country. The league did not return to TV in China until 2022. NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the league lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the aftermath of the 2019 incident.
Silver hinted this fall that the NBA could make its return to a country that was once a bedrock of its international strategy.
“I think we will bring back games to China at some point,” Silver said in October. “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. We accepted that. We stood by our values.”
The Nets are owned by Joe Tsai, who was born in Taiwan and is the chairman of Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company. The Nets were also one of the teams in China in 2019, the last time the league held games there.
The games will be played at the Venetian Arena, which is owned by the Las Vegas Sands Corp. Patrick Dumont is the governor of the Dallas Mavericks and the president of the Sands Corp. Both are owned by Miriam Adelson.
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