Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey issued an apology on Sunday for a tweet sent out regarding the Hong Kong protests. Morey’s job appears to be safe, according to multiple reports, and he will not be disciplined by the league for his words, according to Shams Charania of The Athletic. The now-deleted message read simply “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong,” but has led to significant repercussions for the Rockets in China.
Tencent, the NBA‘s exclusive digital partner in China, has suspended business relations with the Rockets, and is offering fans who purchased a year-long “team pass” to watch Rockets games the chance to switch it to a different team. A number of other Chinese companies have pulled sponsorship deals with the Rockets as well. Morey issued the following statement on Twitter:
Read the whole thing. I suspect Morey’s eyes were blinking S-O-S while he typed his forced apology.
And as Clay Travis tweets in response, “This NBA-Hong Kong-China mess is fascinating. The NBA is super woke when it comes to things like made up US transgender bathroom disputes, but bent the knee to China when Daryl Morey came out in support of democracy & upset communists. Shows you how hypocritical the league is.”
* The headline is from CBS, where supporting freedom and democracy is always a controversial move.
At Disney-ABC-ESPN, Morey’s pro-Hong Kong statement isn’t just controversial — it’s “offensive:”
While, the above screen capture shows 75 retweets, it doesn’t show the amount of comments in response — they’re over 700 as of the time of this post being written, which is quite a ratio.
UPDATE: Enough of a ratio that Shelbourne deleted the above tweet, and tried to explain her wording — but didn’t apologize for the sentiment.
Clay Travis adds, “Think about this for a minute, Adam Silver banned the use of the word ‘owner’ in the NBA because he said it was racially insensitive & then apologized to Chinese communists because one of his executives had the gall to say he supported democracy.”
More round-up at Twitchy: ‘This is a hostage video:’ Houston Rockets GM apologizes to Communist China for his ‘stand with Hong Kong’ tweet.