Sun Yang, a three-time Olympian, was found guilty of refusing to cooperate with testers in a unanimous decision handed down by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

At issue was a September 2018 incident when testers arrived at Sun’s home. A confrontation ensued, with Sun claiming that authorities did not possess proper credentials. His security guard ultimately smashed a vial of blood so it could not be analyzed.

“The athlete failed to establish that he had a compelling justification to destroy his sample collection containers and forego doping control when, in his opinion, the collection protocol was not in compliance,” the CAS panel stated.

As the first Chinese male swimmer to earn Olympic gold, the 6-foot-7 Sun began his winning streak by taking the 400- and 1,500-meter freestyle titles at the 2012 London Games. He followed up with a freestyle victory at 200 meters at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games.

Sun also came away from those Olympics with two silvers and a bronze.

But allegations of Sun’s cheating have triggered resentment within the sport. Opposing swimmers refused to stand on the podium beside him at last year’s world championships.

Sun, 28, would not regain eligibility until the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. He can appeal the ban to the supreme court in Switzerland, where the CAS is located.

For someone who was raised in Italy, came of age in Philadelphia, and ultimately established himself as a star in southern California, it is telling that Kobe Bryant once referred to China as his “home away from home.” Bryant first visited the country in 1998 to host a basketball camp, a year after he entered the NBA straight out of high school. The trips would become a fixture of Bryant’s offseason during his 20-year career. There he was, wowing fans with slam dunks on the Great Wall. And there he was, getting mobbed at airports in scenes reminiscent of Beatlemania. “I thought I was famous,” remarked LeBron James at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, “until I got here with Kobe.”

Bryant had the best-selling sports jersey in China for years, and by the time he retired in 2016, he was far and away the country’s most popular athlete. A reported 110 million people tuned in to Tencent, the NBA’s digital streaming partner in China, to watch Bryant’s last game for the Lakers. “It’s harder for me to walk around here than in the States,” Bryant said during a 2013 visit. “In the States, you get a lot of recognition. They say, ‘Hi.’ They want autographs and pictures. But here, it’s uncontrollable. They rush you and surround you to the point where you can’t go out.”

Bryant’s shocking death last month prompted a similar mass outpouring on Weibo, essentially China’s version of Twitter, where he had posted a video message commemorating Chinese New Year to his nine million followers just two days before his helicopter crashed in Calabasas, California.

Bryant’s status in China serves as a powerful symbol of the NBA’s successful global outreach; his rise in popularity dovetailed with basketball’s own precipitous growth in the country. But the league that Bryant helped popularize there remains off the air on Chinese state television, the fallout from a months-long standoff over a top NBA executive’s expression of solidarity with the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

As the NBA commences the second half of its season, and continues to mourn the untimely loss of a legend, there is a sense of hope that the league is close to repairing its relationship with China – even if there are questions over whether it will ever be the same.

There have indeed been signals in recent weeks of a potential thawing of tensions between the two sides. Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the United States, offered a tribute to Bryant on Twitter last month, praising the Lakers great “for his contribution to the world of sport and to #ChinaUS people-to-people exchanges.” Chinese consul general Huang Ping offered gratitude earlier this month for the NBA’s $1.4m donation to Hubei province, where the coronavirus outbreak originated.

At a press conference held during the league’s all-star festivities in Chicago, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said his sense is that the games will return to China Central Television (CCTV), Chinese state-run television, “at some point in the future.” The NBA has not been broadcast on CCTV since October, when Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey caused a furor by tweeting, and quickly deleting, a message urging his followers to “stand with Hong Kong.”

At the league’s midseason celebration in Chicago, Silver made it clear that the ball is in China’s court. Silver added that “there continues to be enormous interest for the NBA in China,” and that his “sense is that there will be a return to normalcy fairly soon.” The All-Star events in Chicago were distributed on Tencent, with which the NBA inked a five-year, $1.5bn deal last summer to continue as the league’s exclusive Chinese digital streaming partner.

Despite the ongoing blackout on CCTV, Tencent resumed showing a few NBA games every night not long after the Morey dispute, and has continued to do so since. A recent survey of sports business executives found that more than 60% believe that the firestorm surrounding Morey’s tweet will have a “non-existent” or “minor” effect on the league’s business in China five years from now.

Others aren’t so sure. “The question is: what does normalcy mean?” Victor Cha, a professor at Georgetown University who served as director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council from 2004-2007, told the Guardian. “When Adam Silver talks about a return to normalcy, I assume he’s talking about NBA access to Chinese viewers and the Chinese market, but the real question is: is that the only way to measure normal? Is the new normal that there’s essentially a de facto muzzle on players saying anything related to political issues in China?”

“If tanks roll through Hong Kong,” Cha added, “are they just not going to say anything?”

Although Silver rebuffed China’s purported demands to sack Morey, and defended his right to freedom of expression, the NBA and its players were not exactly hailed as profiles in courage in the wake of the controversy. A spokesperson for the NBA responded initially by saying that the league recognized the “views expressed by Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey have deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China, which is regrettable.”

LeBron James, who has personified the league’s embrace of political activism perhaps more than any other player, said Morey was “misinformed” on the matter. Lawmakers in Washington chastised the league for that response. Republican senator Ted Cruz, who represents Texas, commended Morey for calling out “the Chinese Communist Party’s repressive treatment of protestors in Hong Kong,” and pilloried the NBA for “shamefully retreating” out of financial concerns.

The fiscal implications have loomed large over this saga. Speaking in Chicago this month, Silver said he expected the NBA to lose “hundreds of millions of dollars” over the standoff with China due to the TV blackout and the severed business relationships that resulted from the dispute. That, he noted, was much less than some of the doomsday forecasts that projected the controversy to cost the league billions.

“Certainly, probably less than $400m, maybe even less than that,” he said. “It’s substantial. I don’t want to run from that. We were taken off the air in China for a period of time, and it caused our many business partners in China to feel it was, therefore, inappropriate to have ongoing relationships with us.” But Silver once again stressed that he doesn’t “have any sense that there’s any permanent damage to our business there.” It’s a business relationship rooted in the NBA’s emergence as China’s most popular sports league, the fruits of the league’s decades-long push into the Asian market.

In 1992 under the late David Stern, Silver’s predecessor as commissioner, the NBA opened its first Asian office in Hong Kong. Stern, who served as commissioner from 1984 until 2014, is widely credited for exporting the league to China. In 1987, Stern went to Beijing with a demo tape in hand in the hopes of brokering a historic deal. There, he forged a relationship between the NBA and CCTV, offering the state broadcaster videotapes of league footage each week in exchange for advertising revenue. Stern often recalled trips to the country in the 1990s, when locals would ask about the “team of the red oxen,” better known in the English speaking world as the Chicago Bulls.

But the watershed moment came in 2002, when Yao Ming was drafted by the Rockets. In Yao, China could finally claim its own first bona fide star playing in its most beloved sporting league. Powered by ballots cast back home, Yao was twice the leader of NBA All-Star game fan voting. He was named an All-Star in each of his eight seasons for the Rockets, a career that coincided with the NBA staging more events in China. In 2004, the Rockets played a pair of preseason games in Shanghai and Beijing, marking the first time the NBA tipped off on Chinese soil in 25 years.

Since 2007, the NBA has held preseason games in China every year except one. About 800 million viewers in China watched the NBA last season, and modest estimates of the amount of revenue the league generates there are generally pegged at about $500m annually. NBA China, which launched in 2008 and handles the league’s business ventures in the country, is worth more than $4bn, according to Forbes.

The Rockets also loom large over all of this, of course. They are, by virtue of Yao’s connection, the NBA’s most popular team in China, bringing the league’s success story in conflict with the crisis over Morey’s tweet. Since then, Rockets games have been banned, forcing the team’s fans in China to resort to illicit web streams. Cha wonders if the team will return to CCTV or Tencent even when the rest of the league is back on Chinese airwaves. He pointed to the frayed relationship between China and Norway, which stemmed from the late human rights activist Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, as a potentially useful precedent. Liu was incarcerated in a Chinese prison at the time, and the price was placed on an empty chair during the ceremony in Oslo. In the years that followed, Norway’s salmon exports to China plunged.

“I’d imagine the longer this goes on, the more unhappy the people are going to be. Basketball is extremely popular in China. The Rockets are a very popular team,” Cha said. “You can substitute Norwegian salmon. There is really no substitute for the NBA.”

As the NBA’s Chinese sponsors and fans scrutinize the league’s ongoing response to Morey’s remark, James has a clear financial incentive to maintain a positive image in the region. He holds a lifetime deal valued at $1 billion with sports retail giant Nike, which saw its sales in China surge 27 percent to nearly $1.7 billion in its most recent fiscal quarter alone. James’ signature sneaker line is one of Nike’s most prominent offerings.

James’ standing in China could also impact the future efforts of his media production company, SpringHill Entertainment. The firm is producing “Space Jam 2,” the highly anticipated sequel to NBA legend Michael Jordan’s original film, which will seek a massive return from Chinese audiences.

“So many people could have been harmed, not only financially but physically, emotionally, spiritually,” James told reporters on Monday night. “So just be careful what we tweet and we say and what we do even though, yes, we do have freedom of speech. But there can be a lot of negative that comes with that, too.”

Nike earned more than $6 billion in revenue from China during its 2019 fiscal year. While the company has yet to publicly address the NBA’s lingering issues in China, Nike stores in the country pulled Rockets merchandise from shelves in response to Morey’s tweet, according to Reuters.

James’ assertion that Morey was “misinformed” on Hong Kong drew widespread criticism among U.S. politicians and demonstrators on the ground in the city, some of whom were seen burning James’ jersey in protest. The remarks were also seen as a reversal of course for James, who has emerged as a prominent community activist and one of the NBA’s most outspoken voices for social justice causes in the United States, but opted not to weigh in on the Hong Kong protests.

“This statement is unbelievable. “So many people could have been harmed”? By Daryl Morey daring to express sympathy for democracy? News flash: people ARE being harmed – shot, beaten, gassed – right now in Hong Kong. By China. By the Communist Party the NBA is so eager to appease,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., wrote on Twitter.

James has repeatedly expressed support for former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who led national anthem protests against social injustice and police brutality. Later, Kaepernick sued the NFL’s owners for allegedly colluding to keep him off the field.

“Kap stood for something that was bigger than him,” James said on his HBO series “The Shop” in March after Kaepernick settled his lawsuit against the NFL. “He sacrificed. How many people can wake up and say ‘You know what, I’ll give up everything that I’ve worked for my whole life, for the better of the conversation? I’m gonna lose everything I’ve got personally to better the conversation?’”

A prominent critic of the Trump administration, James famously called the president a “bum” after he engaged in a war of words with Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry. More recently, James hosted California Gov. Gavin Newsom on “The Shop” for a discussion on his decision to sign a bill allowing the state’s college athletes to sign endorsement deals without penalty.

Social media users pointed out that James tweeted a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. in January 2018, which said “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” James remarks drew widespread praise on Chinese social media platform Weibo, with one video amassing nearly 100 million views, according to Variety.

James later sought to clarify his remarks on Twitter.

“My team and this league just went through a difficult week. I think people need to understand what a tweet or statement can do to others. And I believe nobody stopped and considered what would happen. Could have waited a week to send it,” he wrote.

The Lakers and Brooklyn Nets participated in the NBA’s promotional tour in China earlier this month, which took place just days after Morey’s tweet. The Chinese government mandated that the NBA cancel media availability for its two preseason games there, including Commissioner Adam Silver’s scheduled press conference.

Nearly all of the NBA’s Chinese sponsors suspended ties with the league over Morey’s tweet, including the league’s exclusive streaming partner, Tencent Sports. The media firm briefly stopped airing NBA games, but has since resumed broadcasts.

The faux social activist made headlines this week after he declined to answer a simple question about the NBA siding against the pro-democracy Hong Kong protesters. Kerr then made matters worse for himself Thursday by arguing there is essentially no difference between the United States and communist China. After all, Kerr explained, America has gun violence. That somehow justifies China’s brutal repression of its religious minorities and against Hong Kongers defending their freedom.

Kerr was asked specifically whether he has been asked about human rights abuses during previous trips to China, a country in which the NBA has a significant financial stake.

“It has not come up in terms of people asking me about it, people discussing it,” the coach told reporters. “No.”

There was a brief pause. Then, he continued.

“Nor has [America’s] record of human rights abuses come up either. You know, things that our country needs to look at and resolve. That hasn’t come up either,” Kerr added. “[P]eople in China didn’t ask me about, you know, people owning AR-15s and mowing each other down in a mall. I wasn’t asked that question.”

Kerr’s remarks to reporters came amid a broader discussion of President Trump’s criticisms for the coach’s dodge on the Hong Kong question.

Trump said Wednesday of Kerr, a frequent critic of the president, that “he was like a little boy, he was so scared to be even answering the question. He couldn’t answer the question.”

“He was shaking ‘Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know,’” the president added. “He didn’t know how to answer the question. And yet, he’ll talk about the United States very badly.”

For the record, this is what Kerr said earlier this week about the NBA siding with the communist Chinese:

It’s a really bizarre international story. A lot of us don’t know what to make of it. It’s something I’m reading about, just like everybody is, but I’m not going to comment further than that.

What I’ve found is that it’s easy to speak on issues that I’m passionate about that I feel like I’m well-versed on and I’ve found that it makes the most sense to stick to topics that fall in that category. So I try to keep my comments to those things and so it’s not difficult. It’s more I’m just trying to learn.

My brother-in-law is actually a Chinese history professor and I emailed him today to tell me what I should be learning about all this and what’s happening and so I’m trying to learn just like everybody else.

On Thursday, Kerr made things so much worse for himself and his team by telling reporters that China’s long history of state-sponsored brutality and oppression is not unlike some of the problems plaguing the U.S.

“[N]one of us are perfect, and we all have different issues that we have to get to, and saying that is my right as an American,” he said. “Doesn’t mean that I hate my country. It means I want to address things, right?”

He added, “So we can play this game all we want and go all over the map and, you know, there’s this issue and that issue. The world is a complex place, and there’s more gray than black and white.”

I knew the NBA and the little men who serve as its various cogs and gears were beholden in some way to Chinese blood money. I just did not expect to hear one of them make the argument so soon that there is essentially no difference between the country that allows its citizens to speak freely and arm themselves and the country that has 3 million people in concentration camps for their religion. I did not think I would have to say this at any point in my life but, no, gun violence in America is not comparable to China’s 70-year history of state-sponsored genocide.

The U.S. is a damaged but fundamentally good country. China, whose government has murdered tens of millions of people over 70 years and imprisons millions more today, is evil. This is not hard.

The fact that Kerr is comfortable criticizing America, all while carefully avoiding saying anything that can be construed as a criticism of China, should tell him a little something about the difference between the two countries. But that would require a certain amount of self-awareness and intelligence, neither of which appear to be his strong suit.

Mr Morey – in a move that would reverberate around the sporting world and beyond – then fired off a tweet expressing support for the protestors in Hong Kong who have been taking to the streets for the past four months.

While he hasn’t explicitly admitted as much, it’s safe to say he now regrets hitting that send button.

Close to a week later, the fallout from that single, quickly-deleted tweet – which included the words “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong” – is still dominating the news cycle.

We’ve seen posts from Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta, an explanation of sorts from Mr Morey, and not one, but two statements on the matter by the National Basketball Association (NBA), none of which appears to have appeased Chinese fans and sponsors, who were furious that an outsider was stirring up an issue many there regard as non-negotiable.

Freedom of speech, they argued, doesn’t apply in certain areas and it wasn’t Mr Morey’s place to comment in the first place.

To top it all off, the league’s handling of the situation simultaneously managed to spark a backlash back at home, with US fans and politicians alike calling out the league for pandering too much to China.

The timing could not have been worse: the LA Lakers and the Brooklyn Nets are in China right now to play two pre-season games, but national broadcaster CCTV refused to broadcast them. Once the state-run channel had made that decision, online streaming partner Tencent had little choice but to follow suit.

Admittedly, pre-season games don’t quite get pulses racing in the way that regular season games do, but this has become something of a tradition in China, where basketball rivals football as the country’s most loved sport.

NBA teams have played in front of Chinese fans in 13 of the past 14 years, with LeBron James – unquestionably the biggest name still active in the league – set to lead his Lakers in Shanghai and Shenzhen this week against the Nets, whose new owner Joe Tsai co-founded Chinese tech giant Alibaba.

Basketball in China is almost as old as the game itself and Chairman Mao was known to be a big fan.

But the sport took a great leap forward once Yao Ming joined the Rockets in 2002. Yao played the bulk of seven seasons in Houston from 2002-09, before finally retiring after two more injury-plagued years.

During that time, his popularity with fans saw him named to the All-Star team eight times – even during periods when he barely played – firmly establishing the Rockets as “China’s team”.

However, the backlash to Mr Morey’s ill-fated social media post has been so strong that Houston has quickly lost that mantle.

Meanwhile, Rockets merchandise has been cleared from various e-commerce platforms in China, while almost every Chinese sponsor of the league, plus others associated directly with the team, have suspended those partnerships.

Accurate statistics in a country of 1.4 billion people are notoriously hard to come by, and the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA)’s claim that 300 million Chinese play the sport is wildly optimistic.

But the country still has millions of basketball fans, making China a clear number two market for the NBA, behind only the US.

And for a society that doesn’t have a long history of paying for online content, Tencent’s five-year streaming deal that puts an estimated $1.5bn (£1.2bn) in NBA coffers is far ahead of anything else in the sporting landscape here.

In other words, China matters.

We’ve seen similar incidents with foreign entities play out in China previously. Dolce & Gabbana, Marriott, Delta Airlines and others have all fallen foul of consumer sentiment in recent years for an ad, post or oversight that was perceived in China as a slight on the country.

The crisis playbook then follows a familiar pattern: the foreign brand in question issues an apology, keeps a low profile and tries to work its way back into the good graces of those consumers.

But this time it’s different.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has made it clear he will not apologise for Mr Morey’s tweet, citing the American league’s values of “equality, respect and freedom of expression”.

He has some leverage here. If consumers are annoyed with a fashion brand, hotel or airline, they can easily switch to another option; but the NBA stands apart in China.

The CBA is a supplementary, complementary league, but in no way is it ready to replace the NBA as the league of choice for Chinese fans.

Claims that basketball fans might instead follow another sport are also off the mark.

The impact of this controversy is two-fold. The NBA’s regular season starts on 22 October, and the hope is that the dust will have settled by then, and the league broadcast partners can return to regular programming – albeit with Houston Rockets games kept offline for at least a few more months.

It’s still possible, though, that China doubles down on its call for an official apology, meaning that the situation could escalate still further and the broadcast ban extend into the regular season – though if that does happen, enterprising fans will likely find a way to access pirated live-streams from overseas.

But, more importantly, the risk of a backlash back home for companies operating in China is becoming greater.

With consumers in the West now hearing about the demands placed on those firms in China, the companies – already acutely aware of the political minefields that lie in wait – will have to weigh their moves in the East with the reception those moves get back in the West.

And as the NBA has found this week, it’s becoming nigh on impossible to strike a balance between those two very different sides, even with carefully-worded statements.

Some may choose to pick sides and prioritise one market over another for a variety of different reasons, while the majority will do their very best to continue the high-wire act and stay out of trouble in the first place.

But with online mobs all over the world amplifying every perceived misstep, expect to see more companies stuck between a rock and hard place in the future.