The NBA brought star-studded lineups to Macau this week for the league's return to China after six years but many of the biggest wins happened off the basketball court, industry insiders and experts told AFP.
Thousands of fans cheered Friday as the Phoenix Suns -- led by four-time NBA All-Star Devin Booker -- beat the Brooklyn Nets, with celebrities such as David Beckham, actor Jackie Chan and Alibaba founder Jack Ma in front-row seats.
It heralded the NBA's return to China for the first time since being effectively frozen out of the country in 2019 after a team official tweeted support for democracy protests in Hong Kong.
Hours after Friday's pre-season match at a sold-out Venetian Arena, US President Donald Trump announced an additional 100 percent tariff on China, underscoring the volatile backdrop of the NBA's detente with Beijing.
Even so, the NBA and star players are rushing back to the post-pandemic Chinese market, with LeBron James and Stephen Curry visiting the country this year to hawk their brands.
"One thing a lot of the athletes would say is that everyone read about James Harden coming to China (in 2023), selling his wine and selling out in like 60 seconds," said Michael Lin, a VP at sports digital agency Mailman, an IMG company.
Booths near the arena showed off the NBA's Chinese brand partners, including e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, live-video app Kuaishou and dairy giant Mengniu, as well as merchandise aimed at younger consumers.
David Leiner, president of trading cards for Fanatics Collectibles, said the company recently started selling China-specific NBA card packs in more than 30 cities, adding that the 10 yuan ($1.4) entry price point was "critical".
"For us, it was very important to get the product broadly distributed," Leiner told AFP.
- Decades of business -
China became a priority for the NBA in the early 2000s in part due to Yao Ming's superstardom, said Mark Fischer, former managing director of NBA China.
Fischer said the business entity NBA China was valued at $2.3 billion around the time of its 2008 formation.
That figure grew to more than $4 billion a decade later, according to NBA deputy commissioner and COO Mark Tatum in a 2018 Forbes interview.
In 2019, the league signed a deal reportedly worth $1.5 billion with Tencent on exclusive online streaming rights.
But that was soon overshadowed when Houston Rockets official Daryl Morey went public in support of Hong Kong protesters.
The NBA making its return in Macau showed that Beijing was "opening the side door but not the main gates and red carpet just yet", said Fischer, now an international sports consultant.
Macau is a special administrative region of China, distinct from the mainland, and famous for its casinos.
The teams are also taking their chance to claw back missed revenues from the vast China market.
The Suns hired the marketing team behind American internet celebrity IShowSpeed's well-received China streaming tour.
"We're going as far as working with (the Suns) to shoot content around the players eating mooncakes and making sure that the correct terminology around Lunar New Year versus Chinese New Year is used," said Andrew Spalter, founder and CEO of digital marketing firm East Goes Global.
The Nets, owned by Alibaba chairman Joseph Tsai, have an in-house Chinese social media team.
- Warning -
Victor Cha, a geopolitics expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warned that China still held the "ultimate form of power over the NBA" and could leverage its huge market to force firms to self-censor.
A sports marketer in China who spoke on condition of anonymity said the Morey tweet took just minutes to trigger online outrage and that because of the sheer number of people in and around the NBA it will be "impossible" to avoid a similar incident.
"We know how quickly things can spiral out of control," the source said.
"It's not even about an individual NBA player, it's anybody associated with the brand."
Appearing in Macau on Thursday, Las Vegas Sands president and COO Patrick Dumont tried out Alibaba's AI technology that purported to translate spoken NBA match commentary from English to Chinese, or vice versa.
The Dallas Mavericks owner asked if he could say anything he wanted, as opposed to reading out scripted lines shown to him on a screen.
His host pointed at the text and replied, "Technically, you can say what you want, but this would be the most optimised."
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