Great Sport Moment #43497
The NBA is often understood to be at the forefront of social change in sports in North America. It’s the most progressive and inclusive of the big American Leagues and it has the numbers to back up this claim.
NBA is the only American sport with a bigger fan share of black Americans (45%) than white (40%). The age numbers also paint a rosy picture for the NBA with 45% the fans being under the age of 35, as compared to an NFL where nearly half the accounted fan base is over the age of 50. Even when it comes to gender, NBA is the leader, where through the WNBA, NBA is the only major sporting league that has a sister concern (established since 1996) offering an avenue for female athletes to go pro after college.
In an interview with the Atlantic, Richard Lapchick, the director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida said “The NBA understood that diversity was a moral imperative. But it was the first league to understand that diversity and inclusion are also business imperatives.” The league has really high inclusiveness scores (in fact the highest among all sports) on Lapchick’s reports for both gender and racial hiring.
This has been a growing trend since the time of late David Stern (former NBA Commissioner)and has continued in the time of the current commissioner Adam Silver.
It is no secret that NBA is the American sport with the biggest international market. The sport of basketball is much more popular than the likes of Baseball and American Football and the NBA having the best talents from around the globe competing in it, helps raise its popularity all around. It is also very well known that the NBA’s biggest market outside of the US is its market in China.
The sport of basketball is big in China and NBA stars are massive figures in the country. Yao Ming’s years at the NBA solidified that bond and the ties have only grown stronger ever since then. From Michael Jordan to Kobe Bryant and now James Harden, NBA stars have visited China often and they have been celebrated there like idols. That was an active strategy the NBA used to market the league through the players, who were at times considered bigger than the sport.
The Chinese market and NBA were a match made in heaven, but it all came to a grinding halt when the General Manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted in support of the Hong Kong protest against the Chinese bid to reclaim it as a part of its sovereign. In hindsight it wasn’t the smartest move by a GM in a league which pulls major revenue from the country in question, given that the country in question has always been known to be prickly about pretty much anything that it feels is an interference.
But as much as NBA would like to keep it’s business alive, it is a league that prides itself on being progressive and also operates out of America. With negotiations between the two nations on bilateral treaties being a major talking point, NBA got dragged into the conversation as sponsors and broadcasters in China threaten to pull out of their deals with the NBA if the League didn’t apologize for the statements of Morey and pretty much have him fired. That the Houston Rockets are the team Morey is the GM of, this was even more damning, given that Rockets are among the teams that have the biggest fan base in China, thanks in no small part to Yao Ming playing his prime years on a good Rockets team.
The NBA released a first statement that said Morey did not speak for the Association and that he should have considered the reaction to the tweet before sending it, but soon Adam Silver responded to the calls for Morey’s head by instead relying on the values of Freedom of Speech. Adam Silver not only refused to have Morey removed, he went on the offensive against the idea that the league would ever consider firing someone who is a part of the league, for having their own beliefs and speaking in favor of them.
There is no doubt about what Adam Silver felt about the whole thing. I am sure it was something he wishes would never have happened and he didn’t have to go against a big money making market of the league, but what happened happened and Silver’s refusal to let money decide the course of his action speaks to the ideals of NBA, because it was not a small matter. The revenue being talked about is not a single digits in millions.
$400 Million is the estimated amount that the NBA will lose from this season alone after all Chinese ties were cut due to Silver’s stance in support of Morey’s freedom of speech. And that impact will be felt all over the league. Already the booming salary cap is expected to fall below expectations for the first time in years for the 2020-21, and the real impact of the cut ties is only going to be felt in the 2021-22 season. This cuts into the pocket of everyone in the league, the staff, the players, the owners, everyone. But the NBA stood for the players rights to speak against the President of the country, it wasn’t going to change that stance for an employees personal stance in favour of protestors in a different country, even if it brought on major financial implications on the league.
And that is pretty freaking great.
Sport Microcosm 