When LeBron James and his son, Bronny, take the court as the NBA’s first father-son duo on opening night, Americans won’t be the only ones watching history unfold. Seven thousand miles away, the “second center of the basketball universe” will be glued to their screens, the converts of an unlikely and controversial relationship between China and the league’s opportunistic owners. And while the NBA congratulates itself for netting another 300 million fans, most of us can’t help but lament the values these teams had to swallow in the process.

However cruel and murderous the Chinese communist regime may be, its lucrative partnership, league officials have decided, is too valuable to jeopardize over something like genocide. After all, one team co-owner scoffed, “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs,” right? Four years ago, Dallas Mavericks’ owner (now a minority owner) was blunt when asked how he could claim to care about human rights but looked the other way on China’s gross human rights abuses. His justification was simple — money.

“They are a customer of ours,” Cuban told Megyn Kelly at the time. “And guess what? I’m okay doing business with China. … [W]e have to pick our battles.”

Four years and $10 billion dollars in profits later, nothing has changed. That much was obvious on X, when Cuban tried to shame Elon Musk for a possible conflict of interest in China. Chuck Flint, Senator Marsha Blackburn’s (R-Tenn.) former chief of staff, refused to let the hypocrisy pass by. “Are you concerned about your own conflicts given the NBA’s financial ties in China?” he asked pointedly. “Will you denounce their horrific human rights abuses and speak out against the Chinese regime? … [T]he NBA was running training camps in Xinjiang where there is ongoing genocide of Uyghurs. Please tell us you’ll step up to [the] plate and confront Commissioner Adam Silver about the NBA’s continued silence.”

Cuban replied nonchalantly. “I have said I’m against Chinese and all human rights violations. The NBA exports content to China and gets paid for it. I’m okay with that.” As long as the money’s flowing, he’s “okay” with millions of Uyghurs heading to bed every night “preparing for death at any moment.” He’s “okay” with the true stories of gang rape, live organ removal, child sodomy, medieval torture, forced sterilization, and other inhumanities. He’s “okay” turning a blind eye to the largest torture network since the 1930s, as long as it doesn’t affect his business’s bottom line.

“Trust me,” human rights activist and former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom said, “They all know [about] the ongoing genocide. They all know all their shoes and t-shirts or jerseys made by slave kids with slave labor. But they’re going to talk about the problems [that] are happening in America, because they know that it’s not going to hit their pocket.”

Kanter Freedom, whose outspokenness cost him his NBA career, spoke frankly at the Republican National Convention about the league’s gag order on China. When the center criticized Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2021, the commissioner had his back. But that all changed the day he took on China and its systematic oppression of religious minorities. “The whole support stopped,” he remembers.

“And I was like, ‘I’m confused, I don’t talk about politics. This is a human rights issue. We’re talking about three million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps right now, getting tortured and raped every day.’ And, I had a conversation with [Commissioner] Adam Silver, I had a conversation with so many of my teammates. They said, ‘Well,’ especially my teammates, they said, ‘Well, we love you. We support you. But we just cannot do it out loud.’

I was like, ‘Why?’ They said, ‘Well, we have shoe deals. We have endorsement deals. We want to get another contract.’”

Even Kanter Freedom’s agent urged him to drop his cause and walk away. “To be honest with you, my agent called me the day I started to criticize China, and he said, ‘Look, I work for the animal, I work for the NBA. So, I’m going to be honest with you. If you say another word about China and especially Nike, you’re never going to be able to dribble that basketball in the NBA ever again. And you’re 29 years old, that is going to cost you between $40 and 50 million dollars.’ I was like, ‘Well, this is bigger than myself.’ I hang up the phone. I just keep doing what I’m doing.”

Now, after years of being blackballed by his sport, Kanter Freedom’s pro career is over. And the league’s heartless consumerism doesn’t just continue — it’s expanded. At the end of August, Senators Blackburn and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) teamed up to send yet another letter to the NBA, this time about their partnership with another human rights abuser: Rwanda. The country’s leader, Paul Kagame, agreed to bring the NBA’s Basketball Africa League to his nation — a deal that was struck only when the league agreed to ignore the blatant atrocities taking place under Kagame’s rule.

In a letter to Silver, the bipartisan senators fume that the NBA has “long positioned itself as a beacon of social justice,” but it continues to develop “relationships with dictators and despots.” Anyone who “dares to question Kagame’s rule,” they write, “is jailed, disappeared, or brutally murdered.” “Playing ball with dictators and brutal regimes should not be the NBA’s business model,” they argue. “Instead, the league should use its influence to advocate for governance reforms, including respect for the rule of law.”

But then, look at what’s modeled by America’s top leaders. Joe Biden tried to excuse China’s systematic rape, torture, and killing of millions of minorities as “a different norm.” Surprising everyone who’s followed the atrocities of the internment camps, the Biden-Harris administration waved away the abuses, saying, “Culturally, there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow.” “Norms” like physically annihilating an entire race of people?

Unfortunately, we can expect more of the same if Kamala Harris wins the White House this November. Just this month, the Democratic nominee brushed past China to call Iran America’s “number one adversary.” Her concern, like Cuban’s, isn’t holding the regime accountable but “protect[ing] America’s business interests.”

That’s not likely to change without a shot of moral courage the Left is so sorely lacking. In just the NBA alone, ESPN calculates that the 40 principal owners “have more than $10 billion collectively invested in China.” That’s a lot of dough to have tied up with murderous despots who hate America. It’s time, FRC’s Arielle Del Turco insists, for the league and its woke owners to “humbly rethink” their positions and start exploring how they could “amend their business practices to better respect human rights,” not double down and make excuses.

But the sad reality is this, she warns, “No excuse can hide the plain truth that the NBA is happy to put profits over people. And that’s shameful.”