National Basketball Association (NBA) commissioner Adam Silver said he expects his league will once more play games in China after having not done so since 2019, according to multiple media reports.

Silver, speaking at Columbia University in a sports management conference, said he expects a China return despite no NBA games there since two 2019 pre-season contests were played in controversy following a tweet supporting freedom for Hong Kong by then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey.

“I think we will bring back games to China at some point,” Silver said.

“We had a well-known incident there pre-pandemic with a tweet and China’s government took us off the air for a period of time. We accepted that. We stood by our values.”