The NBA Brings Its China Games Back, With Durant in a Rockets Jersey
The Houston Rockets and Dallas Mavericks will play the NBA's returning China Games in Macau this October — the league's most visible step back into China since the 2019 freeze, marketed this time as a fan festival rather than a political statement.
The NBA is coming back to China. In October, the Houston Rockets and the Dallas Mavericks will play two preseason games at the Venetian's Cotai Arena in Macau, on October 9 and 11 — the league's China Games after a gap of several years, announced on the NBA's own Weibo account with ticket lotteries, fan events and a hashtag, #起程NBA中国赛2026# ('Setting off for the NBA China Games 2026'), that has been trending for days.
The roster news is what has Chinese fans buzzing. Kevin Durant, the former MVP now traded to Houston, will play; so will Kyrie Irving and Cooper Flagg, the Mavericks' heralded rookie, in what one fan post called a Texas derby on Chinese soil. 'This year's NBA China Games is so good — Rockets vs Mavericks,' wrote the commentator Xu Jingyu, a Weibo sports account with a large following. 'I can't wait to see Durant up close, and when I do I'll shout his loudest nickname in the NBA: the Grim Reaper.'
The games are officially preseason exhibition, but their location and their framing carry more weight. Macau, the casino special administrative region, is hosting rather than Shanghai or Shenzhen, the mainland cities that staged the previous China Games — a calibrated choice for a homecoming that has been years in the making. Relations between the league and China froze after a team executive's 2019 tweet supporting Hong Kong protesters: games were cancelled, state broadcasters stopped airing them, and Chinese sponsors walked. Streaming of NBA games has quietly resumed on Chinese platforms since, and the league has spent the years since rebuilding its position, but full-fledged China Games — with the NBA's official accounts promoting ticket giveaways alongside Chinese player ambassadors like Ding Yanyuhang and Zhou Qi — mark the most visible step of the thaw.
The commercial logic is unchanged from the era before the freeze. China remains the NBA's largest international market, its games are watched by hundreds of millions there, and Chinese players and brands are woven through the league. What has changed is the temperature: the return is being presented not as politics but as product — a fan festival with Durant in it. For an international reader, the useful datum is how quickly the ledger can reopen. A rupture that once looked permanent has been repaired by a decade's commercial gravity, one exhibition game at a time.