NBA returns to China after six years

I am in Macau, the world’s gaming capital. I’m here for the NBA’s return to China in the last six years, there has been no NBA game here. Looking at these big banners killed over buildings. Reminds me of being back here in 2019. The players were sitting in their hotel and they could see that the workers were tearing down the same types of banners and peeling their faces from the building. A few days before, Houston Rockets General Manager, Daryl Morey, had sent a tweet in support of protesters in Hong Kong. This made the Chinese government very upset. NBA supported him. We do not apologize that Daryl exerts his freedom of expression. And then shrouded chaos. All week. Sponsors pulled out. And many of the players were concerned about whether they would even be allowed to go home if things got worse. It was, it was so surreal. They lost about $ 400 million. Just from one situation, the Chinese market is huge for the NBA. There are many basketball fans here…. And the league has been working on growing them for decades. And then getting hit to Macao and playing a game in China again is a very big deal for the league. When you ask someone with the league how did these games come together? The name, as they mentioned, is Patrick Dumont. He is a top manager at Sands Casino. And owner of Dallas Mavericks. By 2021, the Chinese government renegotiated what is called concessions with the casinos here in Macau. In these concession agreements, the government demanded that the casinos spend a certain amount of non-play activities such as entertainment, as sports. And Sands had this arena in the Venetian, so Dumont saw to bring NBA Hit as an opportunity to meet this requirement. One of the other main players here was Joe Sy, the owner of Brooklyn Nets. Joe Tsai is chairman of the Alibaba Group, which is a Chinese tech giant. He has a lot of deep ties to the Chinese government, the nets, and spent a lot of time in the last few years meeting Chinese officials and having events celebrating Chinese culture. They have spoken to Chinese media and said this market is so important to us. We are interested in this market more than anything else NBA team. They even launched a reality show. It’s a dance team competition to choose dancers for their games here in Macao Sound Up: “Brooklyn Nets finds the best dancers in China” There is a huge amount at stake for these teams because. The league saw what happened when something went wrong and they lost this market even briefly. There is a feeling that this should go right and that this is a great opportunity to get something back that they lost.