No China travel, NBA tells teams amid coronavirus outbreak
- NBA’s financial losses after Chinese backlash to Daryl Morey’s Hong Kong tweet not as bad as initially feared: reports
- Houston Rockets GM expected to become free agent despite deleting post and apologising for protest support
“China's coronavirus outbreak has reached such a serious state that the NBA sent a memo to teams last week to clarify that this is now considered a global health emergency and reminding them that travel to China is strongly discouraged at this time, league sources say,” he wrote on Monday.
NBA teams have not visited since the Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Lakers played preseason games in Shanghai and Shenzhen last October.
Those games went ahead despite the fallout from a tweet posted by Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey supporting Hong Kong’s anti-government protesters. Chinese state television pulled all NBA broadcasts, as did streaming site Tencent.
While games are not yet back on terrestrial television – although that is expected to change with the NBA All-Star Game on February 16 – the financial implications of the fallout appear not to have been as bad as first feared.
The NBA salary cap for the 2020-21 season is only down US$1 million from the original projection of US$116m, according to ESPN. League executives had projected that it could have been as low as US$113 million because of lost revenue from China.