JOE TSAI, THE billionaire owner of the Brooklyn Nets, made his fortune in China. His company, Alibaba, began in a Hangzhou apartment and has since been described as "Amazon on steroids." When Tsai bought into the NBA, commissioner Adam Silver predicted he'd be "invaluable" to the league's expansion in the world's largest market.
Two and a half years later, Tsai personifies the compromises embedded in the NBA-China relationship, which brings in billions of dollars but requires the league to do business with an authoritarian government and look past the kind of social justice issues it is fighting at home.