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Brooklyn Nets, Phoenix Suns to resume China Games next fall in Macau

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GBA International Sports Business Summit Held In Macao
Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images

The league’s only Chinese owner will take his team, which includes the league’s only Chinese player, to China next fall to play the Phoenix Suns.

The Brooklyn Nets and the NBA are headed back to China.

Six years after the last NBA China Games between the Nets and Lakers collapsed in chaos after then 76ers GM angered Chinese officials by posting a tweet supporting democratic protests in Hong Kong, the Nets and Phoenix Suns will return to the country, specifically Macao for preseason games in mid-October. A southern Chinese city a short drive or ferry ride from Hong Kong, Macao is known as the Chinese Las Vegas.

Shams Charania and Brian Windhorst of ESPN were first with the news Thursday night…

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The South China Morning Post, AP and New York Post quickly followed with reports of their own. All four noted that games will be played at the 14,000-seat Venetian hotel and resort in Macao. AP reported that the games will take place October 10 and 12.

In their report, Charania and Windhorst wrote that the initiative that led to the series included Joe Tsai, the Nets owner who is the league’s only owner of Chinese heritage. The split between the league and the world’s second most populous country had hurt the league financially. Commissioner Adam Silver estimated in 2021 that split had cost the league $400 million that year, but said it was the cost of maintaining the league’s values. There are an estimated 300 million fans in China and prior to the 2019 split, there were months where NBA revenue from China exceeded that from North America.

Charania and Windhorst noted:

The divide led to the loss of lucrative sponsorships and the temporary removal of NBA games from Chinese broadcast television in 2019, which cost the league hundreds of millions in the ensuing seasons.

Sources said the relationship has improved over the past several years with the assistance of NBA China CEO Michael Ma, who was hired in 2020.

Both Silver and Nets owner Joe Tsai have expressed confidence that games would return to China in the near future.

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, which is headed by Tsai, reported Friday morning that the Nets-Suns games will be part of a $125 million deal that will bring NBA teams to both Macau and the nearby city of Zuhai over the next five years. SCMP also reported that “to commemorate the deal,” six former NBA stars will participate in a celebrity game at the Venetian Saturday. Former Net and Chinese Basketball Association star Stephon Marbury will be among the six.

In February, Tsai, speaking at the Greater Bay International Sports Business Summit in Macau, specifically mentioned the city as a possible site for NBA games. The NBA “would love” to resume playing games in China and Macau, Tsai said.

“I think the NBA is in a very good place with respect to its relationship with China,” Tsai said then, according to Reuters. “China is actually the NBA’s biggest fan base. So what happened before, I think it’s water under the bridge.”

Beyond Joe and Clara Wu Tsai’s unique ownership, the Nets also feature the league’s only Chinese player, Cui Yongxi, a 21-year-old who signed a two-year, two-way deal in the off-season. Cui, known as Jacky, is seen as China’s top young prospect. He is also the first Chinese player in the NBA in six years.

Brooklyn is the third most popular team in China, behind only the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers, according to report last year by a consultancy that tracks U.S. sports brands in China. BSE Global, the Nets parent company, also has established a five-person China Business Strategy Group to monitor business opportunities in the People’s Republic and maintains one of the most popular NBA pages on Weibo, the big Chinese social media site, with 7.3 million followers.

The Venetian Arena is owned by the Las Vegas Sands conglomerate which is in turn controlled by the Adelson family, also the majority owners of the Dallas Mavericks. The games will also include new youth development programs and social impact initiatives in Macao to teach basketball and the game’s values to children.

As AP reported Thursday night, the agreement is the culmination of a number of smaller initiatives.

It’s all part of a long series of moves toward some sort of return to normalcy between China and the league. The NBA, on some level, has been welcomed back for a while: Miami’s Jimmy Butler, who has an endorsement deal with Chinese apparel company Li-Ning, has toured the country and drawn large crowds in each of the last two offseasons, while Golden State’s Stephen Curry and Sacramento’s De’Aaron Fox drew enormous crowds when they visited in September.

Timing could also be advantageous for the NBA’s next big TV rights deal, one covering China and Asia.

The game could have geopolitical implications as well. Although President-elect Donald Trump has had a fraught relationship with China, most recently threatening tariffs on all Chinese goods, Miriam Adelson, the matriarch of the family that controls the Mavs, was Trump’s biggest financial supporter in the 2024 election.

China has used sports diplomacy in the past, most famously in 1972 when China invited the U.S. ping-pong team to play the Chinese team. That began a series of events that eventually led to President Richard Nixon’s “opening to China” ultimately leading to diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the People’s Republic.

From 2004 to 2019, ESPN noted, 17 NBA teams played a total of 28 preseason games in China. The NBA played two preseason games at what is now called the Venetian Arena in 2007, when the Orlando Magic faced the Chinese men’s national team and the Cleveland Cavaliers.