china Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Sorry, Congress, Adam Silver and the NBA aren't going to stop doing business with China
When the U.S. is at war with China in 20 years, on the list of microaggressions that incited the conflict will surely be NBA-China relations. The Association’s dealings in the People’s Republic of China are so well-documented and lucrative that they created in-roads for its players, who may not real...

The WNBA is the league of ‘contract divorces’
The thing about marriage that most people don’t realize, or forget, is that it’s a binding legal document — thus making it a contract. But, despite how divorce is the breaking of a contract, and union, the thought of putting the two terms together has generally been a foreign concept — until the WNB...

Athletes Unlimited league arrives for women's hoops with new model
A new league of professional women’s basketball kicked off last night in Las Vegas with WNBA stars Lexie Brown, Mercedes Russell, and Odyssey Sims taking the court. Athletes Unlimited is hoping to change the game in the U.S. in more ways than one — the question is whether its unusual format and smal...

So what is the Olympic spirit, anyway?
We’ve all known that these upcoming Olympic games were a bad idea, and that’s putting it insultingly lightly. When they were first announced, even if you could get past the tiny little morsel of the egregious human rights abuses of the Chinese government (and you shouldn’t), there’s the whole thing ...

Warriors’ minority owner dragged for declaring the NBA’s stance on Uyghurs out loud
“No one cares about genocide” is, to put it lightly, a concerning stance to take, but it is the stance that billionaire and Golden State Warriors minority owner Chamath Palihapitiya chose to espouse on his podcast this week....

Mount Everest records first COVID case, somehow
You would think some remote corners of the earth are naturally protected from a global pandemic. Uh, think again. According to Outside, Mount Everest has an expedition member who recently tested positive for COVID-19....

Taiwanese baseball sets a new high bar for pregame antics tightrope walker
At this time last year, Taiwanese baseball was just about the only live sports happening on the planet, and as enjoyable as it was to see something that felt close to normal during the chaos of the early stages of the pandemic, the Chinese Professional Baseball League has receded to lesser global pr...

Jeremy Lin deserves a roster spot, but the NBA is drunk on bare-minimum contracts
Much like Isaiah Thomas signing a 10-day contract on April 3 with the Pelicans, Jeremy Lin is just looking for one more chance in the NBA. Based on his G League production this past season, he’s earned it. As I said last week, the league has a problem with its veterans being cast aside in favor of y...

Canada wants 2022 Winter Olympics out of China, says country is committing ‘genocide’
The 2022 Winter Olympics are less than a year away and one country is starting to call for the games to relocate over egregious human rights abuses. ...

Everyone Forgot That Daryl Morey Still Hasn't Discussed His Hong Kong Tweet
What if I told you that we knew that this was going to be an unusual NBA season before a single game was played....

Adam Silver Says Issues Between U.S. And China Have "Absolutely Nothing To Do With The NBA"
At the beginning of Inside the NBA on Thursday, Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley sat with commissioner Adam Silver just a couple days after the crew tackled the league’s China debacle for the first time this season. As a quick note for context about this segment’s somber tone and pacin...

An Interview With The Viral Chinese Stunt Drinker Who Became Our King
One day late last month, Liu Shichao, a 33-year-old farmer in China’s northern Hebei province, awoke to a flood of messages that he had become famous on a foreign social networking platform called Twitter. Liu had never heard of this app; social media giants like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have...

Kyrie Irving Takes Break From Eternal Quest For Enlightenment To Comment On Pro-Hong Kong Protests
Between settling into a new offense and coyly reciting monologues from Altered Carbon in his spare time, Kyrie Irving has had few opportunities to comment on Daryl Morey’s pro-Hong Kong tweet and the reckoning with the NBA’s malleable corporate politics that followed. The league canceled news confer...

Adam Silver Says The Chinese Government Asked Him To Fire Daryl Morey
Adam Silver appeared at a Time magazine event this morning in New York City, where he spoke on the roiling controversy his organization has been in since Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey expressed a modicum of support for the Hong Kong protests. It was Silver’s first interview on the subject since ret...

LeBron James, One Day After Tossing Daryl Morey Under A Bus: "I Won't Talk About It Again"
LeBron James finally spoke on Monday about the outsized controversy surrounding Daryl Morey’s deleted tweet supporting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. LeBron’s position was weak and transparently cynical, and he took a justified beating for sharing it, and ultimately spent part of his Monday ...

LeBron Made His Choice, And He Chose LeBron
For whatever his faults may be (not being on your favorite team, hubris, brazenly studying the room without trying to hide it, etc.), LeBron James has consistently been a voice of progressive reason, but he has also been relentlessly acquisitive. Thus, no one ought to be nearly so surprised, shocked...

Enes Kanter Appears To Take Shot At LeBron James's China Comments, Says "Freedom Is Not Free"
On the most generous possible read, the NBA-China news cycle has revealed just how little players and coaches have ever considered the ethical stakes of doing business with an authoritarian state. The more cynical read is that they understand these stakes well enough but have decided there’s way to...

LeBron James Finally Takes Question About China, Responds By Licking The Boot
LeBron James has been silent on the matter of China throwing a massive temper tantrum over Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeting and deleting a limp slogan in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. With the NBA spasming and losing bowel control around him, the world’s most visible ...
![The Future Of Adrian Wojnarowski's Tencent Show Is Up In The Air After He "Liked" Daryl Morey's Hong Kong Tweet [Update]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/a6egltyzkdqnyoyq7dwo.png)
The Future Of Adrian Wojnarowski's Tencent Show Is Up In The Air After He "Liked" Daryl Morey's Hong Kong Tweet [Update]
Now that last week’s roiling spat between the Chinese government and the NBA has mostly cooled, the global-sports-industrial complex is back to business as usual. Pre-season NBA games were held in China on Thursday and Saturday and everything went off relatively smoothly (with only a few minor hitch...

Steve Kerr Reminds Us Who The NBA's Unifying Powers Really Serve
“The world is a complex place and there’s more gray than black-and-white.” That is how Steve Kerr rationalized his refusal to comment on the not-actually-all-that-complex topic of the NBA bowing to the Chinese government’s rage over an American in America exercising of one of America’s most fundamen...