NBA ready for China return after six-year absence: Why basketball giants are returning to China?

The NBA will return to China for the first time in six years with two pre-season games in Macau between the Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns next October, reports said Friday. No NBA games have been held in China since two pre-season contests in 2019 after a tweet from then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey in support of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.

Basketball is hugely popular in China and in the fallout the NBA lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of it being yanked off Chinese television until 2022.

ESPN, citing unnamed sources, said the relationship between the NBA and China had improved with the aid of NBA China chief executive Michael Ma, who was hired in 2020.

Reports said the games in Macau will be played at the Venetian Arena, part of the Las Vegas Sands conglomerate controlled by the Adelson family — the majority ownership group in the Dallas Mavericks.

Games will be played on October 10 and 12 next year and are part of a multimillion-dollar agreement to stage two annual NBA pre-season matches over the next five years in Macau, according to a South China Morning Post report.

“The most important fan base for the NBA is here in Macau, and we have a partner in Sands China that is investing in sports, so that is why we are bringing the games back," the newspaper quoted the NBA’s deputy commissioner Mark Tatum as saying.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said at a sports management conference in October that he thought the league would “bring back games to China at some point".

“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," Silver said.

“We accepted that. We stood by our values."

The NBA has looked to grow globally, including playing pre-season games in Abu Dhabi earlier this month.

Emirates Airlines sponsors the NBA Cup, the league’s in-season tournament.

China is home to a huge basketball fanbase and from 2004 to 2019, 17 teams played a total of 28 pre-season games there.

Macau is a special administrative region under China’s “one country, two systems" framework.

Known as China’s Las Vegas, Macau is the only Chinese city that allows gambling.

The multibillion-dollar industry has remained the city’s economic lifeline and main attraction for visitors, although Chinese leader Xi Jinping has urged Macau to diversify its portfolio.