Adam Minter, Columnist

Basketball-Crazy China Sees Opportunity in NBA Lockout: Adam Minter

October 27, 2011 at 4:02 PM UTC

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale."

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How is China, the world’s largest basketball-loving nation, taking to the National Basketball Association’s ongoing labor strife and the increasingly likely prospect that the 2011–2012 season will be cancelled? Not well.

On Oct. 24, Guan Weijia, vice-director of the basketball department at Titan Sports, China’s leading sports newspaper, wrote a column about the player lockout in the Beijing News titled, “Everybody is a demon.” In it, he said that NBA Commissioner David Stern was “the demon of all demons and he is Satan who is the King of demons in this labor dispute.” Guan was not much kinder to Billy Hunter, the executive director of the NBA Player’s Union, and his role in the fruitless negotiations: