An old tweet from Sixers GM Daryl Morey leads to tense exchange on Capitol Hill

While the Sixers are home waiting on next week’s NBA draft lottery, Daryl Morey is making news on Capitol Hill.

During a Senate hearing on the shift in sports broadcasting from television to streaming Tuesday, an old tweet from the Sixers’ president of basketball operations resurfaced during one senator’s interaction with NBA executive William Koenig, who handles the league’s media rights deals.

In October 2019, while still the general manager of the Houston Rockets, Morey offered his support for anti-government protesters in Hong Kong by sharing a graphic stating, “Fight For Freedom Stand with Hong Kong.”

The tweet was later deleted, but not before Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, which holds the country’s exclusive TV rights for the league, dropped all NBA games for nearly three years. On top of that, all the league’s Chinese partners cut ties, costing the league tens of millions of dollars.

“I had moments where I thought I might never work in the NBA again, for reasons I was willing to go down for,” Morey told ESPN after being hired by the Sixers in 2020.

Since then, the NBA has mended its $5 billion relationship with China, with commissioner Adam Silver suggesting the league could play games there in the future. There’s certainly a lot of money on the line — a 2022 ESPN investigation found NBA owners had more than $10 billion invested in China — which drew skepticism from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), an outspoken critic of the country’s communist government.

“You all have had quite a cozy relationship with the [Chinese Communist Party],” Blackburn said, pressing Koeing on whether the NBA cut a deal or conceded on the free speech front to shore up their financial interests in China.

“Senator, I can certainly confirm that one of the NBA’s most important values is freedom of speech,” Koeing said. “In fact, the example you cited before of Daryl Morey, he was not disciplined or censored in any way in light of the comments that he made .”

As for the hearing itself, not much ground was covered, and most of the senators on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee — including Sens. John Fetterman (D., Pa), Andy Kim (D., N.J.) and Lisa Blount Rochester (D., Del.) — were no-shows. A handful of senators used their time to pontificate about the Trump administration’s plans to defund PBS and NPR.

About the only interesting nugget to emerge from the hearing came from MLB’s Kenny Gersh, the league’s executive VP of media and business development. Gersh said MLB’s goal is to move away from regional territories for its teams and create one place where fans can go to watch their team’s local games, whether that’s a national streaming package or MLB Network.

“Our main TV rights deals come up after the 2028 season, and that’s what we’re looking to achieve,” Gersh said, pointing to a central hub where fans can easily find their local team’s games.

What that means for regional sports networks like NBC Sports Philadelphia remains unclear. The Phillies are in the middle of a 25-year, $2.5 billion deal to broadcast games on the network through 2041.