The league capitalized handsomely. Its audience was young, hip and politically liberal, and the N.B.A. marketed itself as the most woke of pro leagues.

And then one of its general managers decided to tiptoe beyond the boundaries of this nation.

“The league enjoys LeBron James being a spokesman back in Akron and Cleveland and speaking out on American politics,” noted Victor A. Matheson, an economist of sports and a professor at College of the Holy Cross . “Where it messes with you is that the N.B.A. does not necessarily want its folks to be outspoken on China.”

The pro leagues, in fact, run like bloodhounds after the scent of their fan bases. The N.F.L. is the N.B.A.’s doppelgänger. Its fan base, although diverse racially, tends toward cultural and political conservatism. When the lords of the N.F.L. boycotted Colin Kaepernick for the crime of silently taking a knee during the national anthem, they could do so in the reasonable expectation that their fans would either applaud, or grumble but still buy another sausage or team jersey.

The N.B.A.’s challenges are complicated after a different fashion. To read some of its press clippings is to guess that the league is on an inevitable march to the top of the sports mountain. The conductor should toss the brakes on that train. The N.F.L. stands as the undisputed champ of the American sports, and Major League Baseball remains in comfortable, if sleepy, second place.

The N.B.A. has those brilliant demographics, but further rapid growth in the United States is not assured. The league’s genius instead was to extend its tentacles around the world, the first American sports league to lay plausible claim to becoming a global business. Its stars hail from many continents, and its television contracts extend from Europe to Tencent in China, which this year signed a five-year, $1.5 billion deal.