NBA commissioner Adam Silver has announced the league expects to lose "several hundred million dollars" due to a row with China over a tweet by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey supporting
The NBA's Chinese following Morey's tweet in October, just before two NBA teams played pre-season exhibition matches in China.
State broadcaster CCTV also stopped airing NBA games for the country's millions of ardent basketball fans and has not resumed.
"The magnitude of the loss will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars," Silver told a press conference on the sidelines of the All-Star Weekend in Chicago.
The tweet was quickly deleted, but ignited a massive backlash from China. Source: Twitter
"Probably less than $400 million, maybe even less than that," he said.
However, "it's substantial", he added.
"I don't want to run from that ... But I don't have any sense that there's any permanent damage to our business there."
Commissioner of the NBA Adam Silver. Source: EPA
The commissioner said he expected CCTV to resume broadcasts of NBA games but did not give a timeframe.
