A fateful tweet about a free Hong Kong reportedly wasn’t the beginning of the NBA’s trouble with China in recent years.
Before Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey sparked a firestorm in the NBA’s most lucrative international market, the league had encountered rampant problems at its three basketball academies in China, according to a blistering report from ESPN's Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada.
Among the biggest reported issues were a culture of physical abuse by Chinese coaches, players not receiving proper education, brutal living conditions for players, police harassment of American coaches and one camp being located in the province of Xinjiang, where a million Uighur Muslims are being held in concentration camps as the Chinese government attempts to erase their culture.