President Donald Trump meets with China's President Xi Jinping at the start of their bilateral meeting at the G20 leaders summit in Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019. Kevin Lemarque | Reuters

Many financial journalists and political pundits have been trying for years to get the U.S. public more concerned about China's increasingly repressive regime and the questionable trade-offs many American companies have been making to continue doing business in the country. Thanks to the NBA, Twitter and a Chinese government that feeds a national "outrage culture," those journalists and pundits won't have to try so hard anymore. Coverage of Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey's now-deleted tweet in support of the Hong Kong protests, and the response to it from China and the NBA, has already earned more attention than dozens of other stories in recent years documenting similar questionable relationships between U.S.-based companies and Beijing.

Many NBA fans who might have been excited or just indifferent about their beloved league's increasing business connections with China are now asking whether promoting the game is worth the concessions and kowtowing to Beijing. Based on what we hear on New York area sports radio the last few days, fans of the Brooklyn Nets are certainly asking that question and also scrutinizing new Nets owner Joe Tsai. Tsai responded quickly to the Morey tweet controversy with a lengthy Facebook post Sunday night. Tsai's post is exceedingly disturbing for two reasons. One, it reads exactly like something the government in Beijing would write, filled with trigger phrases the Chinese government often uses like "separatist movement," "territorial integrity," "sovereignty," "invasion of Chinese territories by foreign forces," and many more. Second, Tsai descends into the same false argument Beijing often uses when it comes to the Hong Kong protests. The Chinese government likes to focus on the alleged separatist nature of the movement. That's because it makes it sound like a destructive rebellion by an isolated part of the region.