Inside the playbook turning offseason trips into a league-wide business strategy
Photo courtesy of Phoenix Suns
By the time an NBA star lands at a Shanghai airport and gets mobbed by a crowd before he’s even reached customs, the story usually gets told as a moment — a viral clip, a highlight reel of a country’s love for the game. What rarely gets told is what happened in the eighteen months before that flight: the pitch decks, the platform negotiations, the localized content calendars, and the sponsorship conversations that turned a single team’s experiment into what is now a fairly crowded field.
This offseason alone, the pattern has been hard to miss. Jimmy Butler spent part of his summer touring Chinese cities for Li-Ning, a partnership that has taken him through Beijing, Xi’an, Chongqing and Guangzhou in past years. Oklahoma City’s Jalen Williams, fresh off a championship run, drew airport-sized crowds in Shanghai on his first-ever trip to the country as part of an Adidas tour, and this year returned for a second leg where he confirmed his first signature shoe is on the way. Golden State’s Draymond Green spent part of his August in China as well, meeting Hall of Famer Yao Ming and getting his face projected across a Shanghai skyline. The league itself is heading back to Macao for a second consecutive year of preseason games, this time with the Mavericks and Rockets.
None of this is an accident, and increasingly, none of it is being run out of a single team’s marketing department acting alone.
“Recognition Was Never the Problem”
Rachel Li has spent the past several years inside exactly this shift. As Director of Partnerships at East Goes Global — an agency that helps international teams, athletes and brands build and monetize audiences in China — she has worked on the China-market strategies behind franchises, entertainers and now a growing list of NBA names.
“A lot of people assume the challenge is getting Chinese fans to notice an NBA player or a team,” Li said. “In most cases, that’s not the hard part. The NBA has had built-in recognition in China for decades. The harder part is building something that actually holds — a reason for someone to keep showing up after the initial excitement of a launch or a visit wears off.”
That distinction, Li said, is what separates a viral airport moment from a sustained business.
The Blueprint: What the Suns Did Differently
Before this summer’s wave of tours, Li was part of the team behind one of the clearer case studies of what a sustained China strategy can look like: the Phoenix Suns.
Rather than treating China as a place to repost existing content, Li and the Suns built a dedicated localization strategy — one that combined original content produced directly with players at Media Day, an NBA All-Star influencer campaign, and eventually an in-person tour through Shanghai, Macau and Hong Kong. Over the course of that work, the team’s standing among NBA franchises on Weibo climbed sharply, and its All-Star campaign became one of the more talked-about examples of a team turning digital engagement into a genuine local following.
Li with Phoenix Suns at NBA China Game. Photo courtesy of Phoenix Suns
“Once a fanbase is actually participating instead of just scrolling past, the conversation changes,” Li said. “It stops being ‘should we be in China’ and starts being ‘how fast can we get there.'”
That same logic has applied to athletes as well as teams. Li led the digital launch of Dwyane Wade’s official Xiaohongshu and Bilibili accounts, a rollout that included homepage placement and a Top 10 trending topic on launch, generating hundreds of thousands of engagements — a reminder that even a player already famous in China still has to rebuild a relationship on whichever platform a new generation of fans is actually using.
A Playbook Other Teams Are Now Running
What’s changed in the past year, Li said, is how many organizations are running some version of that playbook simultaneously, rather than treating China as one team’s competitive advantage.
Some of that is visible in the summer’s headlines: Butler’s continued multi-city tours for Li-Ning, Williams drawing his own “mobbed at the airport” moment on his first trip and returning for a second, Green’s Warriors tour landing him a meeting with Yao Ming and a skyline tribute in Shanghai. Each of those is, on its face, a brand or shoe-company activation. But Li said the more interesting shift is happening a level below the headline: teams increasingly want an actual, ongoing strategy behind those moments — localized accounts, a content cadence, a sponsorship pipeline — rather than a single splashy trip.
The Indiana Pacers hosted a fan fest in Shanghai. Photo courtesy of the Indiana Pacers.
Why the Money Is Following the Fans
The commercial case, Li argued, is straightforward once the audience work is done. Chinese companies — from consumer brands to tourism and lifestyle businesses — are increasingly approaching international sports properties directly, rather than waiting to be pitched, once they can see a team or athlete has a real, active local following rather than just global name recognition translated into Mandarin.
“A few years ago, a lot of these conversations started with us explaining why China mattered,” Li said. “Now the brands are the ones reaching out, because they’ve watched what happened with the teams that got there early, and they don’t want to be the ones who waited.”
Li said her team is already building toward the next stretch of the calendar, with several new team and market initiatives in early planning for the coming year — a mix of digital campaigns, in-market fan activations, and new commercial partnerships she said she wasn’t ready to detail publicly yet.
A Market That Keeps Changing Under Everyone’s Feet
If there’s a caution embedded in Li’s read of the moment, it’s that none of this is static. The platforms Chinese fans actually use, and how they use them, keep shifting — from Weibo’s public conversations to Bilibili’s community culture to Xiaohongshu’s more lifestyle-driven audience — which means the version of “being in China” that worked for one team two years ago isn’t guaranteed to work for the next one arriving now.
“Every team that’s landing in China right now is basically asking the same question the Suns asked a few years ago,” Li said. “The answer isn’t going to look identical for each of them. But the teams that treat this as a real, ongoing relationship — not a summer trip — are the ones that are going to still be relevant to Chinese fans the next time the calendar comes back around.”