The People’s Republic of China v.s. Daryl Morey
A mirror of red and green reflected a congregation of disillusioned faces. Rain beat upon the hard pavement of the basketball court as one-time fans circled tattered LeBron James jerseys. Flames engulfed one such jersey in a smoking defiance of the storm. Apostate feet trampled upon others.
No, the year was not 2010 in Cleveland, Ohio; James had not just taken his talents to South Beach. Rather, it was a wet October night at Hong Kong’s Southorn Playground in 2019. And while the Hong Kong basketball fans performed symbolic regicide against the King, they hailed another unlikely NBA figure: Then Houston Rockets General Manager, Daryl Morey.
Morey was many things. A trombonist in high school. An MIT Sloan graduate. A pioneer behind advanced analytics in NBA front office decision making. He was even the producer of the basketball-themed musical, Small Ball.
“Someday,” Morey told the New York Times, “I want to live in New York and just go to shows.”
What Morey was decidedly not, however, was a symbol of international political reform. That changed when—eleven days before Hong Kong basketball fans began chemically synthesizing their once beloved LeBron jerseys into ash—Morey fired off a tweet.
“Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong”, it read.
At this time, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had tightened its authoritarian grip on Hong Kong. Once a region separated from the mainland with insulated civil liberties, a mandate prohibiting protesters’ identity-concealing face masks was issued with riotous results—mere hours before Morey’s tweet.
Motivated by friends in Hong Kong and an investment in the region’s political autonomy that dates to his MIT days, Morey likely never questioned his presumed innocuous tweet. After all, this sort of trifling sentiment is espoused daily on Twitter in the U.S.
What Morey failed to consider? The staggering 10 percent of global revenue that the CCP contributes to the NBA, not to mention the additional 10 billion dollars invested in China by team owners. The man who fashioned a career around his mastery of statistical figures had just inadvertently become a political one.
The Chinese government immediately ceased broadcasts of all Rockets games while the Chinese consulate in Houston professed his deep shock with Morey’s “erroneous comments”, urging the Rockets and league at large “to correct the error and take immediate concrete measures to eliminate the adverse impact.”
With billions of dollars at stake, the league did as they were told in a unified act of self-censorship. Morey’s tweet was quickly deleted; the NBA apologized for the offense caused to their Chinese friends; Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta distanced his franchise from any political ideologies; and Morey acknowledged his potential offense, without fully retracting his statement, saying “I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event.”
The faces of the league followed suit. Rockets guard James Harden placatingly expressed love for the league’s Chinese fans while Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and guard Stephen Curry pleaded ignorance to evade further discussions of Hong Kong. As the league’s biggest ambassador, LeBron James reluctantlyaddressed the subject. “[Morey] wasn’t educated on the situation at hand”, explained the Lakers’ star, later clarifying that he did not believe Morey made “any consideration for the consequences and ramifications of the tweet.
“I’m not discussing the substance. Others can talk about that,” James concluded, culminating in the aforementioned Southorn Playground LeBonfires. The same NBA that once wore “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirts to protest the 2014 murder of Eric Garner by police was now pitifully docile.
Naturally, there were the bad actors. Those who saw an opportunity to condemn a majority black league for previous denouncements of domestic racial injustices, simply because they preferred black men not speak up at all. It would also be disingenuous to deem Morey a martyr as he remains a highly sought after executive in the NBA, now working for the Philadelphia 76ers as President of Basketball Operations.
“I had moments where I thought I might never work in the NBA again, for reasons I was willing to go down for,” Morey told ESPN in his first comments on the matter a year later. “But I love working, I love what I do, and I didn’t want that to happen.”
Still, his actions exposed brazen, league-wide hypocrisy, bad faith opportunists aside. A tome’s worth of knowledge on Chinese socio-political relations is not a sine qua non for being drafted to the Celtics, but the “I’m-not-informed-enough-on-the-situation” excuse falls woefully flat when China’s squeezing of the NBA into self-censorship is utterly bald-faced.
According to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, “to speak up directly about issues that are important [is] part of being an NBA player.” But as Hong Kong fans quickly learned, that obligation to justice knew limits, or rather borders.
“I thought [James] supported democracy and freedom,” said Nikio Yuen, 24, who was present at the Southorn Playground protests. “When it comes to freedom of speech that affects the business of the league, he doesn’t support it.”
To cite the oft stated reminder of the Association’s loyalty to profit over players, basketball is a business. Clearly fans face the repercussions of this adage as well, despite the NBA’s attempts to parade itself as a bastion of social change. With a brief seven words, Daryl Morey embodied that performative progressivism. In return, his league hung him out to dry, and the fans took notice.
