Welcome to Part II of The Tweet Heard 'Round the World. In this part, we get a look at Adam Silver's first interview back in the US, Lebron reaction, and other reactions too. Let's get right to it.
Part II
After the teams got back, Adam Silver had an interview with Time magazine. In this interview he said that financial losses were ‘substantial’. "I don't know where we go from here. The financial consequences have been and may continue to be fairly dramatic."
“I don’t know where we go from here,” said Silver in his first interview since he returned home from the country. He said the league is 'not only willing' to cope with the millions lost, 'but we are [coping]'.
Silver also revealed that China asked the commissioner to fire Daryl Morey, but Silver refused, and continues to stand by Morey's freedom of speech and expression. China, almost immediately, denied having asked Silver to kick out Morey.
“These American values — we are an American business — travel with us wherever we go,” Silver said. “And one of those values is free expression. We wanted to make sure that everyone understood we were supporting free expression.”
Adam Silver, in my opinion, dealt with the two biggest, worst and most controversial topics in NBA history extremely well, and should be applauded not only for his efforts but his stances and how he is sticking by the Constitution in the workplace.
The other story was Donald Sterling, in 2014, right after Silver was appointed commissioner. You can find all sorts of stuff on Google if you want.
No, the story isn't over. We haven't even touched on Lebron James' response, and it was a pretty interesting one.
"I don't want to get into a [verbal] feud with Daryl Morey, but I believe he wasn't educated on the situation at hand, and he spoke," James said before the Los Angeles Lakers-Golden State Warriors preseason game. "And so many people could have been harmed not only financially, physically, emotionally, spiritually. So just be careful what we tweet and say and we do, even though, yes, we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that, too."
Lebron said that Morey should’ve been thinking about others more than himself when he tweeted, since there were NBA players, reporters and officials in China. “I think people need to understand what a tweet or statement can do to others. And I believe nobody stopped and considered what would happen. Could have waited a week to send it."
"I plan on being here and being a captain of this team and trying to figure out how we can win a championship," James said when asked whether he plans to learn more about the anti-government protests in Hong Kong. "That's my main goal right now. I feel like I talked about it yesterday. I tweeted out responses to people not understanding my knowledge and where it came from with my brain and learning from the situation. I'm talking about it now. I won't talk about it again.”
That's the bulk of what Lebron said, but if you watch the video or listen to him actually saying it, a lot of it is rambling and random stuff at the beginning, like he wasn't expecting the question or something.
After quite a bit of backlash from pretty much everyone, Lebron tweeted: "Let me clear up the confusion. I do not believe there were any consideration for the consequences and ramifications of the tweet. I'm not discussing the substance. Other can talk about that."
It was pretty ironic, Lebron going to twitter to clear up something he said, when it's usually the other way around, people tweeting something than clearing it up in a verbal statement.
Lots of people thought that Lebron had a golden opportunity to denounce the Chinese government and support the protestors in Hong Kong, but he didn't take it. Although he had a good point about Morey not thinking about the ramifications, people in China are still burning his jerseys and destroying photos of him.
Others had opinions about Daryl Morey's tweet as well, however they didn't quite receive as much backlash as Lebron's, probably because they were more calculated.
Doc Rivers, coach of the LA Clippers, said that Morey “was right in saying” what he did say, and Rivers clarified that he was talking more about freedom of speech and less about the actual specificity of the tweet.
"I don't know Daryl personally," Net’s Taiwanese owner Joe Tsai wrote, in part. "I am sure he's a fine NBA general manager, and I will take at face value his subsequent apology that he was not as well informed as he should have been. But the hurt this incident has caused will take a long time to repair."
Tilman Fertitta, owner of the Rockets, made a statement in which he basically said that Morrey did not speak for the team, but for himself.
While Daryl Morey will not be fired (yet), the relationship between the NBA and China still hangs in the balance, and this one tweet, which was only up for 5 minutes, could cost the NBA hundreds of millions of dollars.
We can only wait and see.
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