NBA-China crisis: Daryl Morey’s tweet controversy follows him to Philadelphia as streaming giant Tencent blocks 76ers
- Morey said he feared for the safety of his family at one point in fallout from supporting Hong Kong’s protest movement
- The controversy bleeds into a second season, with the pandemic now a major factor in any move to improve NBA-China relations
Philadelphia 76ers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey doubled down on what has become one of the most infamous tweets in the past few years.
The Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Lakers, in Shanghai immediately following the tweet, found themselves sucked into the storm as NBA commissioner Adam Silver was able to temper enough minds to see two exhibition games go off in China, but when the league returns to its largest overseas market is anybody’s guess.
Morey did not do a press interview for nearly a year and the NBA found itself squarely in the sights of the Chinese Communist Party. Games were pulled on CCTV and fans stateside held up signs during games supporting Hongkongers as two competing political ideologies crashed headfirst into one another.
More than a year later, while the firestorm has died down, the embers are still hot.
After taking the Rockets to the Conference semi-finals in the NBA’s bubble play-offs this year, Morey left the team and it appeared his days in the NBA could be numbered. However, that notion was short-lived as this November he became the president of basketball operations for the rebuilding Philadelphia 76ers.
In an interview with ESPN last week, Morey disclosed the most he has ever said about the controversy, that he was close with a number of Hong Kong residents – friends he had made years ago while attending business school – and his tweet was most definitely not off the cuff.
He added he was worried his career in the NBA might be done, but when asked if he regretted his decision to fire off the tweet, he was unwavering.
“I’m very comfortable with what I did,” he told ESPN, noting there was a point where he feared for the safety of his family.
Chinese users of streaming giant Tencent found themselves blocked from watching 76ers games when the 2020-21 season kicked off on December 22.
Much like Rockets games, it is a text only option for the two teams now, which means whenever they play another team, say LeBron James and the Lakers, users must find their way to a VPN to bypass the Great Firewall.
Australia has been mired in tense relations with China since Prime Minister Scott Morrison led calls for an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus. China has responded by imposing increasingly aggressive trade restrictions in a stand-off that has only got worse.
Silver and the NBA appear to have moved on from the debacle but there is no denying the financial harm the league’s row with China has caused them, with losses estimated in the hundreds of millions.
Silver’s defining statement just days after Morey’s initial tweet stands as the dividing line between the league and China. Silver said he backed his right to freedom of expression as an employee of the NBA, and would not punish him, or fire him, as he said the CCP pressured him to do.
As an American-run entity, the NBA has made it values more than clear over the past year. When the 2019-20 season resumed after the initial outbreak of the coronavirus, a massive protest movement was in full swing across the US against racial injustice and police brutality. The words “Black Lives Matter” stamped across half court in the NBA’s Florida bubble said it all, politics were now a part of the game.
The NBA most likely will not play a game in China for the foreseeable future, more so given the pandemic than anything related to Morey’s tweet controversy.
But if the NBA does actually plan a trip to try to win back the hearts and minds of an estimated 500 million Chinese NBA fans, the Rockets, and now the 76ers, will not find themselves checking into a Shanghai hotel room any time soon.
