The tweet that threatened to derail NBA’s decades-long relationship with China, its most lucrative overseas market
- A post by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey set off a firestorm in China
- NBA and its biggest star LeBron James have faced a backlash at home over their response
Hours before tip-off on October 10 in Shanghai, it was still unclear if an exhibition game, featuring some of the top players of the National Basketball Association (NBA), would happen at all, following days of uproar that reverberated across the globe – the league drawn into a bitter feud over an event that doesn’t even appear on its calendar: five months of street protests in Hong Kong, and one of the city’s worst political crises.
The ensuing controversy led to a difficult week of cancelled fan events, angry sponsors, online calls for boycotts and a television blackout in the league’s most important market outside the United States. Banners and other signs promoting the game were stripped from Shanghai’s streets days before the match-up.
Instead, in an October 4 tweet that has since been deleted, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets – the former team of China’s most famous basketball star, Yao Ming – voiced his support for Hong Kong’s protesters with a simple tweet of an image emblazoned with the phrase “Fight For Freedom, Stand With Hong Kong”.
The split-second it took for Morey to tap the tweet icon has left the league’s meticulously cultivated reputation bruised in China, a basketball-loving nation since the Washington Bullets became the first NBA team to play there, in 1979. The feud also left home fans angry in the US, where the league has received harsh criticism from politicians and fans over its response to pressure from Beijing.
“We’re not talking about a couple of Yao Ming jerseys being sold in China,” Warren Zola, a Boston College professor and sports business expert, told The Guardian. “We’re talking about billions of dollars coming in.
“This is an enormous tipping point for the league. They’ve targeted China as a market for the short and long term. And it has come to fruition. But then you have their social activism stance. The NBA and [its commissioner] Adam Silver have been incredibly supportive of their players and employees being vocal. So you have this tension – money versus the rights given to people here in the United States in the Constitution. It’s a huge conflict.”
The firestorm over the NBA also highlights the pitfalls that foreign companies face as they try to navigate the norms of doing business in China – including a public and government quick to react to any slight that challenges the nation’s standing on the world stage.
