The NBA and China in 2019 and the Week a Tweet Cost a League Its Voice

Imagine a league that cannot stop talking. It talks about justice, it talks about democracy, it paints slogans on the hardwood and puts them on the warm-up shirts and sends out statements with the speed of a fast break. Now imagine that one of its executives posts a single sentence of sympathy for peaceful protesters in a distant city, and within days the same league has discovered the virtues of silence. Folks, that is not a moral philosophy. That is a bank statement with a conscience-shaped hole in it.

The week in October 2019 when a pro basketball executive's tweet collided with the Chinese market is one of the cleanest case studies in modern American sports and politics. Nobody had to guess at motives. The sequence of events was public, and the contrast with the league's behaviour at home was so sharp that you could cut yourself on it. Let me walk through what happened, say what it showed, and then say what it means for an American who wants to understand how money buys silence.

The tweet

On October 4, 2019, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, posted a message on Twitter in support of the protesters in Hong Kong. The protests had begun that June over a proposed extradition bill and had grown into a broader movement over the territory's autonomy and the rights Hong Kong had been promised when Britain handed it back to China in 1997. Morey's tweet was an image with a short message of support. He deleted it soon afterward. It did not matter. In an age of screenshots, deleting a message is a little like closing the barn door and then announcing that you have no horses.

I am describing the tweet in general terms deliberately. What matters for the argument is not the exact wording of a one-line message from a basketball executive. It matters that a man who works for an American sports franchise expressed an opinion, in a free country, on a political question about a place where people were demonstrating for their rights, and that the response from a market that accounted for a large share of the league's international business was swift and punishing.

What the money did

The reaction came in a cascade. The Rockets' owner, Tilman Fertitta, said publicly that Morey did not speak for the team. The Chinese Basketball Association, which was then headed by the former Rockets star Yao Ming, suspended its cooperation with the Rockets. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV announced that it would not air the league's preseason games, and the streaming platform Tencent, the league's exclusive digital partner in China, suspended business relations with the Rockets. Chinese sportswear companies Li-Ning and Anta suspended ties or renewal talks with the league.

The league's first statement, issued on October 6, 2019 by an NBA spokesperson, called Morey's tweet "regrettable" and said it had "deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China". Read it twice, because it is a masterpiece of a certain genre. The party that was regretted, in the first statement, was not the government that was jailing and beating protesters. It was the fans who had been offended by an executive's expression of sympathy for them. If you set out to write a sentence that showed whose feelings a corporation was protecting, you could not do much better.

Then came the correction. On October 8, the league's commissioner, Adam Silver, speaking in Tokyo, said that the league would not put itself in a position of regulating what players, employees and team owners say on these issues, and that the league would not apologise for Morey's exercise of freedom of expression. He also acknowledged that there were consequences, and that the league had already suffered significant financial losses. I want to be fair here. That statement was better than the first one, and it was a clear defence of the principle. A commissioner who says that he will not discipline a man for what he said about a political matter is saying the right thing.

The trouble is that the principle was defended to a Western audience and apologised for to the Chinese one. That is not hypocrisy of the dramatic sort, with the villain twirling a moustache. It is the more ordinary sort, in which an organisation discovers its principles are expensive and tries to keep as many of them as it can afford.

The stars

The reaction of some of the league's most visible players was the part that made the American public wince. James Harden, then Houston's star, speaking to reporters alongside teammate Russell Westbrook, offered an apology to Chinese fans, saying "We love China" and that the team loved playing there. LeBron James, speaking in Los Angeles on October 14, said that Morey was either misinformed or not really educated on the situation, and spoke of the potential for harm from tweeting without understanding the consequences. He later clarified that he was not discussing the substance of the Hong Kong issue, only whether Morey had considered the consequences and ramifications of the tweet. Other voices in the league, including some coaches, said little or declined to comment on the grounds that they did not know enough.

Let me say something here about public figures and fairness, because the rules of this blog require it. These are players who have, in the past and since, been unusually willing to speak about American politics. I am not accusing any of them of cowardice or of bad faith. A person in their position faces real commercial consequences, including large endorsement and footwear deals with Chinese revenue behind them. I am pointing out that on this question the usual script, in which a famous athlete is described as a brave voice for the voiceless, changed overnight. For a week the script was: I do not know enough about this to comment.

That is a perfectly respectable thing for a private person to say. It is a strange thing to hear from people who had been encouraged by the same league to speak on a menu of American topics, and who had done so without reaching for a dictionary of caution.

The contrast with the league at home

Here is where the case becomes a lesson. The NBA is the most politically outspoken of the big American sports leagues, and I do not say that as an insult. It is a record, and parts of it are admirable. In 2014 the league banned for life the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers for racist remarks made in a private conversation, a decision that most Americans of every party supported. In July 2016 the league announced it was pulling the 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte, North Carolina, citing the climate created by a state law on bathroom access, a choice that put real money on the line. In 2020 the league and the players' union worked out a way for players to wear chosen social-justice messages on their jerseys during the season's restart in Florida.

Consider how those decisions look next to October 2019. Where the political cost was borne by a state legislature in North Carolina, the league was decisive. Where the political cost would have fallen on the league's own revenue, it was not. I am not saying that the earlier decisions were wrong. Many conservatives would disagree on the merits, and so would I on some of them. I am saying that the pattern is that of an organisation whose moral courage tracks its balance sheet. When speech is cheap, the league speaks. When speech is expensive, the league finds that the issue is more complicated than it first seemed.

This is exactly the "single rule applied to every cause" problem that comes up whenever sports and politics meet, and the longer treatment is in Should Athletes Keep Politics Off the Field? Conservatives Disagree. The NBA case is the sharpest example of a league that had no single rule, only a calculation.

The argument

Let me put it in numbered form, because the Hong Kong episode supports an argument that is about more than basketball.

1. A business may decide to keep quiet. It may not pretend that its quiet is principle. A company that says it declines to take positions on any political question is entitled to its neutrality. A company that takes positions loudly on one set of questions and then goes silent when a customer's government objects has revealed what its positions are for.
2. Market access is a form of leverage, and authoritarian governments know how to use it. The country in question does not need to pass a law against criticism in America. It only needs to make the cost of criticism visible in the quarterly report. That is a quieter form of censorship, and it is much more effective than a ban because the target does the enforcing.
3. The people hurt by the silence are the people the speech would have helped. The protesters in Hong Kong were asking the world to notice them. When a famous institution of free societies flinches, the lesson that the territory's government and its patrons draw is that the world's attention can be bought off.
4. Americans are entitled to ask what a business owes a country that made it rich. Our own country supplied the court, the law, the stadiums and the audience that made the league's success. A league that wraps itself in American values when the audience is American and in market-friendly neutrality when the audience is foreign is trading on a brand it is not paying for.

The Chinese government, after all, is not a mystery. The territory of Hong Kong was promised a high degree of autonomy for fifty years after 1997 under a framework often summarised as "one country, two systems", and in June 2020 Beijing imposed a national security law on the territory that its critics said gutted that promise. The 2019 episode was therefore not a spat over a slogan. It sat in the middle of a real argument about whether a pledge made in 1984 and 1997 would be kept.

The strongest case for the league

The fair case for the league's caution goes like this. A global business has to operate under many legal and political systems. It has employees, partners and fans in China who did not choose their government, and who could suffer if the league made itself an enemy of the state. Cutting off the Chinese market might harm a generation of fans of the sport and the people who work for it, without changing the policies of the government one bit. And a basketball league is not a foreign ministry. It is entitled to tread carefully.

All of that is true, and some of it is persuasive. If the league had said, in the first statement, "we are a sports league with commercial interests in China, we are not going to pretend to be a diplomat, and we will not discipline anyone for their speech", it would have been a sound position, honestly held. The error was in the choice of words, which apologised to the offended and said nothing of the protesters, and in the contrast with its own record at home. The league did not have to be a hero. It had to be consistent.

What other businesses learned, and what readers should ask

The NBA episode is part of a wider pattern. American entertainment companies have long weighed the Chinese box office against their stories, and what the weighing does to scripts and plots is told in Made for Beijing, How the Chinese Market Changed Hollywood Scripts. The general principle, that a company's public declarations should match its conduct, is the theme of Corporate Activism Breaks the Deal Between a Company and Its Customers, and its consumer-side counterpart is in What the 2023 Beer Boycott Taught Corporate America About Its Customers. And the question of how a free society should treat a platform tied to the Chinese state is taken up from the legal angle in TikTok v. Garland and the Hard Clash of Free Speech and National Security.

For the reader, there are three practical questions that this case suggests. Ask of any company that tells you what to think: does it say the same thing in every market? Ask of any league: is its rule on speech the same for a cause it likes and a cause it does not? And ask of yourself: what do I buy, and what does my purchase pay for? Those are not partisan questions. They are the questions of a free person who intends to spend money in a free market.

The Founding angle

There is a long American tradition that treats freedom of expression as a thing we owe to people we will never meet. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration, he appealed to "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind", and the document was addressed to a world audience as much as to King George. When the First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, it protects the tweet from the American government, and it says nothing about what a foreign government may do to a league's television contracts. That gap is exactly the one Beijing used.

The remedy is not a law. It is a habit of mind, and a bit of courage on the part of institutions that claim to have it. A league does not need a statute to know that when an executive is punished by a foreign state for a sentence of sympathy, the right answer is to stand behind him, and to accept the cost. The cost will be real. So is the cost of becoming known as the organisation that apologised for a tweet.

The case in brief

1. On October 4, 2019, a team executive tweeted support for Hong Kong protesters, and Chinese broadcasters, partners and sponsors responded by cutting ties, which exposed how dependent the league's revenue was on one government's goodwill.
2. The league's first statement apologised to offended fans, and its commissioner's later statement defended free expression, so the record shows both the principle and the flinch.
3. The same league had spoken forcefully on American political questions when the cost fell on others, and the contrast shows an institution whose courage tracks its revenue.
4. A company may choose silence, but it may not describe silence as principle, and consumers are entitled to notice the difference.

What you can do: before the next season starts, read the league's own published statement on free expression and ask your team's front office, by email, whether it applies in every market the league sells to.