Adam Silver Says NBA Could Return to China Five Years After Daryl Morey Controversy

On Oct. 4, 2019, then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey sent a simple tweet that changed the global trajectory of the NBA.

Igniting one of the last major sports stories of the 2010s, Morey urged his followers to "fight for freedom" and "stand with Hong Kong" amid pro-democracy upheaval in the country. That earned the NBA significant pushback from China—which governs Hong Kong as a special administrative region—and cost the league hundreds of millions of dollars.

However, the world has changed since '19—just enough, commissioner Adam Silver said in a conference in New York Thursday, to open the door for the NBA's return to the world's most populous country.

"I think we will bring games back to China at some point," Silver said via ESPN. "China's government took us off the air for a period of time. We accepted that. We stood by our values... Anybody in our league has the right to speak out on political matters."

The Rockets were in Japan to play two exhibition games against the Toronto Raptors at the time. Morey and the NBA later expressed regret for the tweet—which in turn won the league considerable bipartisan pushback in the United States.

Morey is currently the Philadelphia 76ers' president of basketball operations, a post he has held since Nov. 2020.