The last time the Brooklyn Nets went to China, their brand new owner had to spend a good deal of time playing diplomat over a random tweet by an NBA executive.

“When I bought controlling interest in the Brooklyn Nets in September, I didn’t expect my first public communication with our fans would be to comment on something as politically charged and grossly misunderstood as the way hundreds of millions of Chinese NBA fans feel about what just happened,” noted Taiwan native Joe Tsai six years ago.

Tsai, who bought the Nets from Mikhail Prokhorov in 2019, was just cutting his teeth as an NBA owner after taking over the Liberty with his wife, Clara Wu Tsai.

Brooklyn was visiting the world’s largest international market for the third time — the Nets also played in China in 2010 and 2014 — fo

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