The US National Basketball Association (NBA) will return to China this week for the first time since 2019.
Two pre-season games are scheduled for Friday and Sunday between the Brooklyn Nets and the Phoenix Suns at an arena in Macau’s Venetian casino and hotel.
China effectively froze the NBA out six years ago when one of the organisation’s managers wrote in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, a former British colony that has seen a clampdown on civil liberties.
The games come after the NBA and Chinese technology giant Alibaba announced a multi-year partnership at the end of last year. The Brooklyn Nets are owned by the company’s chair, Joseph Tsai.
It is the first time an NBA fixture has been played in Macau – a special administrative region like Hong Kong, known for its casinos – since 2007.
The NBA has cast the games as part of efforts to tap into a burgeoning viewership of American basketball in the country, with commissioner Adam Silver telling news agency AFP that there was “tremendous interest in the NBA throughout China”.
Analysis by US sports broadcaster ESPN in 2022 suggested the value of NBA China, the arm that manages its operations in the country, was estimated at approximately $5bn (£3.7bn).
Basketball’s popularity in the east Asian nation skyrocketed when Chinese player Yao Ming was drafted by the Houston Rockets in 2002.
The NBA estimated in 2019 that 300 million people in China played the sport.
The games could be interpreted as the culmination of a slow but steady reconciliation between the NBA and China, on a backdrop of tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade.
China suspended NBA broadcasts on Chinese TV channels and streaming platforms after the NBA refused to apologise or discipline then-manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, who posted on social media: “Fight For Freedom. Stand With Hong Kong.”
At the time, the city was engulfed in regular protests over the erosion of free speech and assembly rights, which culminated in China passing a security law to crack down on dissent. Beijing maintains this was necessary to maintain order.
Mr Morey backpedalled after a backlash from Chinese fans, while the NBA said it was “regrettable” that fans in China were upset and acknowledged he had “deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China”.
Since then, NBA games have gradually returned to Chinese TV channels.
Chinese fans have expressed their excitement about the upcoming games.
“We’d been preparing and planning for this two months in advance,” Lyu Yizhe, from Xiamen, told Reuters in Macau. “It feels extra special because we’re long-time NBA fans – we’ve been watching since 1998, back in the Michael Jordan and Chicago Bulls era.”
Mole Zeng, who travelled from Hangzhou, told the news agency: “I believe that in the future, as the NBA continues to grow in China, more and more star players will come here to meet us in person.”
