“Believe me, the China situation bothers me,” Stern told McCallum at the time. “But at the end of the day, I have a responsibility to my owners to make money. I can never forget that, no matter what my personal feelings might be.”

If all of this strikes you as hypocritical, given the N.B.A.’s reputation as the sports league that encourages freedom of expression and activism more than any other, you are absolutely right. Just don’t forget that there is a long line of American businesses that similarly refuse to publicly back the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and instead focus on mining profit from China’s estimated population of 1.4 billion.

I was just in China for eight days covering the United States men’s national basketball team at the FIBA World Cup. Mere steps from my hotel in Beijing, I had access to Walmart, Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken. McDonald’s outlets are everywhere. The N.B.A. is hardly alone in chasing China’s disposable income at the risk of impinging on its democratic ideals.

The rub for the N.B.A., of course, is that tag it carries as the “wokest league” on Earth. That is not an identity, contrary to legend, invented by the league’s marketing machine — but Silver and other top officials, as well as some marquee players, have undoubtedly embraced and celebrated it.

Every company that boasts purchasing power, everywhere in the world, will flex that muscle upon vendors. Every vendor, everywhere in the world, will eventually yield to its biggest customers. The resulting challenge for Silver’s league — more so than for most American businesses, because of its social footprint and the tremendous visibility of its stars — is how to protect those financial interests without trampling on what Silver on Monday termed “values that have been part of this league from its earliest days.”

The N.B.A., to this point, is struggling mightily to thread that needle and has been roundly bashed on both sides — crushed by segments of the American news media for not supporting Morey’s pro-democracy tweet with more gusto, while a growing number of Chinese institutions appear in a rush to distance themselves from the league. The subsequent geopolitical storm has proved so uncomfortable that Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr, one of the most forthright voices in basketball, essentially declined to comment Monday night when invited by Bay Area reporters to wade into the discussion.

“This isn’t the end of the Rockets or the N.B.A. in China,” Witold Henisz, a management professor and director of the Wharton Political Risk Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “But it reflects the need for companies to have a political strategy — even companies that you wouldn’t think of as having political strategies.”