🏀 NBA: It's "wonderful to be back" in China

🏀 NBA - Quotes from NBA Commissioner Adam Silver on his current trip to Macao for the NBA China Games 2025

Here is the entire text of the brief statement by Adam Silver, verbatim from the SCMP X account, with specific words and phrases highlighted for semiotic analysis later.

I’m including a few other quotes from Silver, made on the sidelines to AFP at an NBA event in Macao, for further analysis below:

1️⃣ What is happening?

The NBA’s presence in China goes back to, at the very least, the turn of the millennium. Coupled with China’s early 2000s meteoric economic rise, the zenith of the NBA-China partnership occured in 2002, when Chinese basketball superstar Yao Ming was drafted to the Houston Rockets. Two years later, in 2004, the NBA began playing preseason exhibition games in China.

Beijing became the home of the largest NBA store outside of North America, with the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) claiming 300 million players in the country (which is said to be wildly optimistic, but also not statistically impossible). Major Chinese companies struck sponsorship deals with the league, including Tencent who agreed to a $1.5B five-year streaming deal. And this is all separate from the basketball-fuelled growth in international (Nike, Adidas) and local (ANTA, Li-Ning) sporting brands in China over the last 20 years.

It’s widely agreed that after the U.S., China is the NBA’s largest market. And yet, all this activity came to a screeching halt in 2019 because of a tweet.

On October 4th 2019, at the height of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, Houston Rockets general manager (yes, Yao Ming’s NBA team) Daryl Morey (who was sitting in his hotel room in Tokyo where the Rockets were playing preseason matches against the Toronto Raptors) tweeted a message of support for the protests, including the words ‘Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong’. Even though he quickly deleted the tweet, it was already too late: the CBA cut ties with the Rockets and China’s official broadcaster CCTV refused to broadcast any more preseason games, meaning online streamer Tencent followed suit. No more preseason games occurred in China for six years.

It was only in December 2024 when Sands China, the Chinese division of the resorts and casino company Las Vegas Sands Corp., announced that the NBA would return to China, this time through Macao, for preseason games in 2025.

2️⃣ What was written, and to whom?

In the aftermath of the tweet and the spiralling challenges in China, Silver was criticised both in China (for politicising a sport) and in the U.S. (for kowtowing to China). Since then, Silver has remained the commissioner of the sport, growing its footprint both through the men’s and women’s game, and has now triumphantly returned to the game’s second largest market. This trip to China is as much about the game as it is about Silver, whose competence and tenacity as the head of the most globally watched American sport continues to pay dividends.

Silver’s statements are his own, and are as much for Chinese audiences as they are for American ones.

DECONSTRUCTING THE TEXT

🗝️ Unlocking Meaning

Silver’s comments solidify the fact that even though the NBA has been absent (in some capacity) from China for the last six years, the popularity of the league continues to dominate. In fact, the partnership with CBA could be seen to be a bit of a coup for the CBA, as it includes player development, opportunities to train and compete with the men’s and women’s teams in the U.S., and generally raise basketball standards across China — all things that the NBA wants to do because it is deep, grassroots access to the Chinese market. Unearthing another Yao Ming only works to both nations’ benefit.

Silver’s choice of words is also important, including how he mentions the NBA and WNBA after first mentioning the CBA and the Chinese national teams. This could simply be to show respect and relevance to the market that he’s speaking in, but it could also mean that the NBA and WNBA is more prestigious and harder to get into than the CBA or the Chinese national teams.

Also, Silver refused to reference, admit, or even acknowledge the six year-old tweet that led to NBA’s ouster from China in the first place. This is despite China’s English language daily Global Times actively referencing the incident in the headline of their article about the return of the NBA to China. Why?

👑 Power Play

Partly it’s because Silver know that there is nothing quite like the NBA in China and the world. For an American sport, it far outranks and outguns its baseball, football (American), and ice hockey cousins. Outside of Korea and Japan, I’m not sure which other country truly plays and follows Major League Baseball. For ice hockey, yes Canada, Russia, and a few Nordic countries play the sport but I’m unaware of their interest and involvement with the National Hockey League. And football (American) seems the most localised of American sports.

Basketball is truly global, and particularly so in China. American basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal was at one time brand ambassador for Chinese sports giant Li-Ning (who continue to sponsor major American basketball players). Former basketball star Kevin Garnett was sponsored by Chinese sports giant ANTA (the third largest sportswear company in the world by revenue, behind Nike and Adidas). They currently also sponsor several other American basketball players.

The NBA is the most premium real estate in the country.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Tell me your reasoning. In next week’s issue, I’ll highlight the most thought-provoking responses.

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