7/29/2020 The NBA’s Nightmare Year Started in China. It’s Ending in a Bubble.

- WSJ

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit
https://www.djreprints.com.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nbas-nightmare-year-started-in-china-its-ending-in-a-bubble-11596024000

NBA

The NBA’s Nightmare Year Started in China. It’s Ending

in a Bubble.
The NBA is back nearly ive months after basketball stopped. It’s been the most tumultuous season
in the league’s history.

By Ben Cohen
July 29, 2020 8 00 am ET

The wildest season in NBA history began last October halfway around the world, on the
streets of Hong Kong, where demonstrators protesting China’s crackdown on civil
liberties were outraged by a law that now sounds ominous: a ban on masks.

What came next for the NBA was an infamous tweet, a geopolitical crisis, the deaths of
Kobe Bryant and former NBA commissioner David Stern, a pandemic, the potential loss of
billions of dollars and the relocation of 22 teams to Walt Disney World for several months
of basketball games in empty arenas.

Now a season that started with turmoil in Hong Kong and China will restart in another
semi-autonomous city, this one in Florida, where life inside the NBA bubble is governed by
laws that minimize the risk of a coronavirus outbreak.

One of those rules? Everyone must wear masks.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nbas-nightmare-year-started-in-china-its-ending-in-a-bubble-11596024000?mod=hp_lead_pos13 1/6
7/29/2020 The NBA’s Nightmare Year Started in China. It’s Ending in a Bubble. - WSJ

The return of the NBA on Thursday marks the end of nearly five months without
basketball and represents a triumph in a wrenching year that went from a mask ban to a
mask requirement. This has been the most tumultuous season that anyone inside the
league can remember.

“That is hopefully the understatement of a lifetime,” Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban
said.

Giannis Antetokounmpo is once again having an MVP season.

PHOTO: MORRY GASH ASSOCIATED PRESS

No league invested more to construct a “bubble” to keep playing through a pandemic.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver has said the league must learn to live with a virus that
has killed more than 150,000 Americans, and he built a consensus among players and
owners that they would be safer inside this controlled environment than anywhere else.

The NBA’s strategy has been far more effective than the nation’s faltering pandemic
response. The bubble appears to be working: There are zero known cases of the virus
among players several weeks into this unprecedented experiment.

If the league completes the playoffs and crowns a champion, it would be the final twist in a
season unlike any other for the NBA.

It began last October with the Hong Kong government’s attempt to ban masks, which
protesters wore to shield their identities and protect themselves from tear gas, in
response to months of public unrest. The mask legislation is what compelled Houston
Rockets general manager Daryl Morey to share an image with seven words that would
come to shake the NBA: “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nbas-nightmare-year-started-in-china-its-ending-in-a-bubble-11596024000?mod=hp_lead_pos13 2/6
7/29/2020 The NBA’s Nightmare Year Started in China. It’s Ending in a Bubble. - WSJ

The extraordinary few days after Morey’s quickly deleted tweet derailed an international
strategy that was decades in the making and thrust the league into a crisis on foreign soil.
It also punctured the NBA’s image at home. James Harden and LeBron James took heat for
appearing to protect their personal business interests at the expense of free speech, while
a bipartisan letter from Congress urging Silver to suspend the league’s activities in China
was signed by Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) Silver felt the
league was caught in “a perfect storm,” he said, collateral damage of a heated trade
negotiation.

But after the NBA’s muddled response, which was too apologetic for U.S. politicians and
not the apology that China demanded, the league ultimately resisted heavy economic
pressure, surprising experts who were accustomed to seeing companies appease Beijing.

The NBA became perhaps the most prominent American business struggling to navigate
an increasingly authoritarian China. It’s still dealing with the fallout. NBA games were
removed from Chinese broadcast TV and haven’t returned, while the streaming giant
Tencent showed a reduced number of games—and none with the Rockets. Silver
estimated the economic hit to be around $400 million, but he’s rejected the idea of the
NBA cutting ties with China, even as diplomatic relations between two global
superpowers have deteriorated.

Demonstrators hold up signs in support of Rockets general manager Daryl Morey.

PHOTO: MARK SCHIEFELBEIN ASSOCIATED PRESS

These problems in the world’s most populous country faded once the games tipped.
Giannis Antetokounmpo put together another brilliant season that will likely win him a
second straight MVP award. LeBron James was once again sublime. But television ratings

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nbas-nightmare-year-started-in-china-its-ending-in-a-bubble-11596024000?mod=hp_lead_pos13 3/6
7/29/2020 The NBA’s Nightmare Year Started in China. It’s Ending in a Bubble. - WSJ

tumbled—in part because the Golden State Warriors went from the NBA’s best team to the
worst after the departure of Kevin Durant and an injury to Stephen Curry.

The season took a somber turn with the death of Stern, the longtime commissioner who
did more to popularize the game than anybody who never played. His memorial service in
January filled Radio City Music Hall. In the front row was a mourner who was hard to
miss: Yao Ming.

The 7-foot-6 former Rockets star is now the chairman of the Chinese Basketball
Association, and Yao’s attendance was interpreted as a thaw in the cold war. NBA officials
even whispered hope of returning to China’s airwaves by the All-Star Game the following
month.

Tragedy struck first. Six days later, Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna,
boarded a helicopter on their way to her youth basketball game. They never made it. All
nine people aboard were killed when the helicopter crashed in Southern California’s foggy
hills. The shocking death of Bryant devastated the NBA, paralyzed the city of Los Angeles
and rippled around the world.

But as the league convened for All-Star weekend in February, events in China once again
interfered with basketball.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver built a consensus among players and owners that they would be
safer inside a bubble.
PHOTO: STACY REVERE GETTY IMAGES

The virus was spreading uncontrollably by then. The league flashed messages of support
for Wuhan on the Jumbotron, but with China’s officials consumed by their epidemic, the
NBA remained banned and the Rockets blacklisted. Instead of televising the All-Star
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nbas-nightmare-year-started-in-china-its-ending-in-a-bubble-11596024000?mod=hp_lead_pos13 4/6
7/29/2020 The NBA’s Nightmare Year Started in China. It’s Ending in a Bubble. - WSJ

Game, China’s sports channel aired figure skating. “It’s almost hard for us to be having
conversations about the broadcasting of games when there is a major national, if not
global, health crisis happening,” Silver said.

The shutdown of American sports less than a month later happened slowly—then
suddenly. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told Congress on the
morning of March 11 that it was time for NBA games to be played without fans. Utah Jazz
center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the virus hours later, and Oklahoma City Thunder
officials sprinted onto the court in a packed arena to stop the game. Silver suspended the
season that night.

It was a startling wake-up call on the day the World Health Organization declared a
pandemic. The next few months would be devoted to planning a logistical undertaking the
likes of which have never been attempted. The league negotiated with Disney, which pays
more than $1 billion annually for broadcast rights, to resume the season in a sequestered
bubble at Disney World in Orlando. NBA players are tested daily, get results back within
24 hours and honor 113 pages of protocols while on the fishing pond and pickleball court.

The biggest hitch so far: Los Angeles Clippers guard Lou Williams missing two games to
serve a 10-day quarantine after he was spotted on a rapper’s Instagram in an NBA mask at
the Atlanta strip club with his favorite chicken wings during his excused absence from the
bubble.

Even if this season does finish, there is financial pain ahead. As league employees were
packing for a long trip to Florida, the NBA laid off an undisclosed percentage of its
workforce in cuts that Silver attributed to the pandemic. And what happens next season
remains uncertain.

But it seemed unlikely that the NBA would even get to this point. If the bubble goes
according to plan, the Finals are scheduled for the first week of October.

It would be exactly one year into the longest season ever.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Which major sport has handled the pandemic the best? Join the discussion.

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nbas-nightmare-year-started-in-china-its-ending-in-a-bubble-11596024000?mod=hp_lead_pos13 5/6
7/29/2020 The NBA’s Nightmare Year Started in China. It’s Ending in a Bubble. - WSJ

Copyright © 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit
https://www.djreprints.com.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nbas-nightmare-year-started-in-china-its-ending-in-a-bubble-11596024000?mod=hp_lead_pos13 6/6