CHICAGO — N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver said on Saturday that the league will likely lose “hundreds of millions of dollars” because of a rift with the Chinese government that has affected sponsorships and television revenue but that he believed there would “be a return to normalcy fairly soon.”

The comments came during Silver’s annual state of the league news conference on All-Star Weekend, which has traditionally been a celebration of the league. Silver also announced that the All-Star Game’s Most Valuable Player Award would be named after Kobe Bryant, the former Los Angeles Lakers superstar who died last month in a helicopter crash.

Silver’s labeling of the business harm to the N.B.A. from its monthslong tension with China as “substantial” was noteworthy because it put in concrete terms how much the league’s relationship with China, cultivated going back to the 1970s, has meant for its bottom line.

“I think that the magnitude of the loss will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Certainly probably less than $400 million, maybe even less than that,” Silver said.