Recall the fact of the tweet that the NBA’s Houston Rockets General Manager sent in support of the Hong Kong freedom protesters.  Recall further the NBA’s abject cowardice in deeply kowtowing to the People’s Republic of China in response to the latter’s projected upset over the tweet and the NBA’s impudence.  The kowtowing was rationalized from the league on down to individual players that they all had money at risk from the GM’s tweet—as if their personal pocketbooks could compare with the sacrifices of life and limb, in addition to economic loss, of those freedom protesters as they struggled for their basic freedoms.

That cowardice was only emphasized, not mitigated, by NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s refusal to tell his teams they had to limit what they said. That came lately.

Recall further, the hoo-raw over the picayune nature of the NBA’s kowtowing and the cynically fiscally-driven rationalizing in which the NBA engaged in defending its response to the PRC government—and its institutional abandonment of those Hong Kong freedom protesters.

Now some information is coming out regarding the cost of the NBA’s behavior—the cost to those pocketbooks the NBA has been so desperate to protect.

The loss “will be in the hundreds of millions,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said on Saturday, the first time he’d used such a number to estimate the cost to the league’s China business. The hit amounted to “probably less than $400 million,” Silver said in response to speculation that the losses could reach $1 billion….

Silver added,

We were taken off the air in China for a period of time, and it caused our many business partners in China to feel it was therefore inappropriate to have ongoing relationships with us.

The NBA is still receiving only greatly reduced coverage in the People’s Republic of China.

This isn’t a cost, or a loss. It’s the beginning (and, sadly, probably the end) of the price the NBA should pay for abandoning our American principles, and with them the good people of Hong Kong, in favor of the good opinion of an American enemy.