[Mark Fainaru-Wada] Behind the scenes, though Tsai and the NBA deny this vehemently, Tsai was seeking to get Morey fired

Today’s ESPN Daily was focused on Nets Owner Joe Tsai, specifically on his and the NBA’s relationship with China.

This interesting tidbit, shared by ESPN investigative reporter Mark Fainaru-Wada, reveals some of what transpired behind the scenes immediately after Morey’s tweet in support of the Hong Kong Protests:

“So now you’ve got this dynamic in which Morey’s being attacked , Tsai is responding in the way he’s responding, and the league is trying to find some middle ground here or figure out how it can exist even as two exhibition games are about to be played in China. And part of our reporting finds out that behind the scenes - though Tsai and the NBA deny this vehemently - behind the scenes, Tsai was seeking to get Morey fired.”

Link to episode. Comment comes around the 21 minute mark.

Edit: US Government involvement

“So one of the things that’s going on is Morey hears from at least one NBA owner that Tsai is trying to get him fired in order to appease the Chinese. Morey connects with a guy named Matt Turpin, who worked in the National Security Council in the Trump administration. Turpin and a couple others volunteer to help Morey, who believes he’s gonna get fired.

One of the things Turpin tells us is he’s working back channels, both in the government and through the NBA, and said, his impression of Joe Tsai’s role in this was that he was extremely unhelpful. He was laying out to the other owners how completely unacceptable it was that anyone weigh in on Hong Kong, and it colored the way the rest of the league lined up against Daryl.”

Edit 2: LeBron’s response behind closed doors

”I don’t think people knew this at the time. There were these games that were about to be played in Shanghai, one of the teams that’s there to play is the Lakers, with LeBron of course. There’s an international incident happening in real time in front of these guys, and there are meetings that happen between the players and the commissioner as well as the players themselves.”

”LeBron has got his new movie Space Jam that’s about to open, it’s in production. The hope - at the time at least - was that it was going to open in China. So behind closed doors, the players are meeting and asking how are they going to deal with this, what are they going to do. LeBron was quite vocal in raging about Morey, and how something needed to happen to Morey.”