In 2021, the casino mogul Patrick Dumont approached the N.B.A. commissioner with a brazen idea: Bring American professional basketball back to China.

The N.B.A.’s relationship with Beijing had been in tatters for two years, after a team executive’s tweet in support of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The resulting controversy cost the league hundreds of millions of dollars. Partners pulled their sponsorships. China’s state broadcaster CCTV stopped airing games.

Western companies that clash so publicly with Beijing rarely get second chances. But Mr. Dumont, an executive with one of the world’s most profitable casino operators, believed that the National Basketball Association could get back into China through Macau, the semiautonomous city where his company ran several highly lucrative casinos.

Mr. Dumont and his family had billions at stake. Las Vegas Sands, which is owned by his mother-in-law, Miriam Adelson, and other family members, was selling its Nevada properties to focus on Asia. The Covid-19 pandemic had devastated profits. And Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, was tightening control of Macau and insisting that casinos diversify beyond gambling.

That last demand meant that Sands needed to spend big on outside entertainment or risk its license.

The league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, was intrigued by a Sands partnership.

What followed was years of diplomacy by Sands, whose owner, Ms. Adelson, is among President Trump’s top donors. Sands executives met repeatedly with Chinese and Macau officials and hosted events celebrating “one country two systems,” Beijing’s term for its governance of Hong Kong and Macau. The Adelson family, with Mr. Dumont at the helm, even bought a majority stake in an N.B.A. team, the Dallas Mavericks. (He said that the purchase had no connection to his efforts to bring the N.B.A. to Macau.)

All of it culminates in Macau this weekend in two preseason games between the Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns at the Venetian Arena, a Sands property. The games are part of a five-year agreement for the N.B.A. to return to China.

“It’s certainly a belief of ours that the two world’s largest economies should have continued dialogue,” said Ron Reese, a Sands spokesman. “It’s in everybody’s best interest.”

The story of how the deal came together is an example of how casino profits, connections and quiet diplomacy healed a political wound. It is a win for the N.B.A., which lost more than $300 million in its rift with Beijing. It is also a win for Chinese leaders, who have sought to burnish China’s global image through influencers, sports figures and other celebrities.

“Sports exchanges between China and the United States reflect public sentiment and serve both sides’ interests,” the Chinese Embassy in Washington said.

The N.B.A. never abandoned its Chinese ambitions. It kept its China offices open. Teams hired experts to put content on Chinese social media. Executives from the Brooklyn Nets, which is owned by Joe Tsai, the chairman of the Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group, met with Chinese officials and diplomats. The league donated to China during the pandemic and installed the son of a former CCTV executive at the helm of N.B.A. China.

Mr. Silver said that the league made no promises to China to curtail speech, and that the N.B.A. would defend the rights of players and team officials to speak freely. But league and team officials said they were keenly aware of the consequences of another controversy.

“In our job, we have to talk about what’s the most important thing, which is to speak through the game,” Jordi Fernández, the Nets coach, said in Macau this past week.

Things have changed since the 2019 controversy. Many players are muting or eliminating their activism, and the N.B.A., like other leagues, now mostly avoids taking political positions. And while human rights groups and politicians criticized the N.B.A. for not taking a tougher stance against Beijing back then, the return to China has sparked little uproar.

“We’re not looking to go over and poke anyone in the eye,” Mr. Silver said. “We’re not setting out to create a diplomatic incident.”

Chaos in a Crucial Market

The October 2019 preseason trip to Shanghai and Shenzhen should have been an easy moneymaker.

The N.B.A. sent its marquee franchise, the Los Angeles Lakers, to play the Brooklyn Nets. Two of the stars, LeBron James and Kyrie Irving, were to face off in a country that loved American basketball. At peak viewership, more people watched the N.B.A. finals in China than in the United States, according to estimates in the Chinese news media.

The trip came amid pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Millions of people were taking to the streets, some of them clashing with the police, in a high-profile challenge to Mr. Xi’s power over the city.

Days before the games, Daryl Morey, then the general manager of the Houston Rockets, posted an image on Twitter that said, “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”

Derek Chang, then the chief executive of N.B.A. China, recalled what happened next: “Everything started to explode.”

With Chinese officials irate, the N.B.A. released two statements — the Chinese version much more contrite than the English. That angered just about everyone. Mr. Silver gave interviews defending Mr. Morey’s right to free speech.

The broadcaster CCTV announced it would cease airing N.B.A. games. The Lakers and Nets watched from their Shanghai hotel as workers removed ads for the game, peeling their faces off the building across the street. Mr. James, in an interview with The New York Times last year, remembered wondering, “How fast can we get out of here?”

Mr. Chang said he spent the next few months “trying to look for the avenue back” to China. He did not see one.

A Big Bet on Basketball

Macau is the world’s casino capital, with gambling returns dwarfing those of Las Vegas. In 2021, when Mr. Dumont broached the idea of N.B.A. games, Macau accounted for nearly 70 percent of his company’s revenue.

A former Portuguese colony, Macau was reclaimed by China a quarter-century ago and declared a special administrative zone. Like Hong Kong, it faces increasing pressure from Beijing as Mr. Xi strips away some of its independence.

One pressure point was gambling. Foreign casinos need licenses, called concessions, to operate. And as it negotiated the 2022 renewals, the Macau government was demanding: higher taxes, the right to cancel concessions in the name of national security and, crucially, more spending on events unrelated to gambling.

Like sports.

High rollers had long used casino junkets to evade China’s restrictions on moving cash internationally. The city had a reputation as a haven for bribery. Las Vegas Sands even paid an S.E.C. fine in 2016 to settle accusations of foreign corruption (the company admitted no wrongdoing).

Mr. Xi was cracking down on junkets and corruption. Leaders wanted to rebrand Macau as family friendly — with casinos footing the bill.

“It’s like the government of France going to every restaurant in France and saying, ‘We want to be less reliant on the cuisine industry,’” said Andrew W. Scott, the chief executive of Inside Asian Gaming, an industry publication based in Macau.

For Sands and the other foreign casino operators, remaining in Macau was essential.

“They didn’t have a lot of leverage,” Mr. Scott said. “You never resist the government.”

Sands suddenly needed to spend billions on outside entertainment to guarantee its license. The arena at the Venetian had hosted mostly concerts and would need to be modernized. But a big-ticket event like the N.B.A. could help publicize the Venetian on the mainland, where casinos are banned from advertising.

“We started thinking about our next phase of investment, which is part of our concession renewal. How can we invest more and innovate in both tourism and hospitality?” Mr. Dumont said. “We felt like the N.B.A. would be a good way to do that. We had the arena. We had the obviously very strong fan base in China.”

When other sports leagues have repaired rifts with China, they have done so on Beijing’s terms.

The English Premier League team Arsenal distanced itself from one of its players in 2020 after he criticized China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims, who have faced human rights abuses.

And the Women’s Tennis Association suspended play in China in 2021 and demanded an investigation into a Chinese player’s accusations of sexual assault by a government official. Two years later, the association returned to China, acknowledging it did not expect its demands to be met.

Mr. Silver is adamant that the N.B.A. made no concessions.

Tiptoeing Toward Reconciliation

There were signs that Beijing was open to reconciliation.

In February 2020, the N.B.A. sent $2.65 million in medical supplies to Hubei Province, the center of the Covid-19 outbreak, earning it accolades in the Chinese state press.

That year, the league named Michael Ma, the son of a well-regarded former CCTV executive, as the new head of its China operations. The network aired two N.B.A. finals games that year and resumed broadcasting a regular slate of N.B.A. games in 2022. That “sent a signal to the rest of the community, other current business partners or potential business partners, that we were no longer being punished,” Mr. Silver said.

The following year, Mr. Dumont and his family bought the Mavericks. The N.B.A. had no qualms about being in business with a casino operator. The league hosts a tournament each summer in Las Vegas, where Tilman Fertitta, the Rockets owner, owns the Golden Nugget. Mr. Silver has long supported legalized sports betting.

The China deal was not a factor in the N.B.A. approving the Mavericks sale, Mr. Silver said. But it had advantages. As an owner, Mr. Dumont would have a stake in the league’s success in China. Additionally, the Venetian Arena was controlled by a private company, rather than the state. “It reduces the number of variables that could go wrong,” Mr. Silver said.

Sands, like other casino companies in Macau, has hosted events in recent years celebrating China’s rubber-stamp legislature and its policy on Macau and Hong Kong. Sands executives also marked Beijing’s National Security Education Day, an annual day of activities to inculcate people with a duty to the state and an awareness of foreign spies.

And Sands executives cultivated relationships with officials, a review of Chinese government meetings shows.

The Adelson family has long played informal diplomatic roles. In the 2024 election, Ms. Adelson was the third-largest donor to Mr. Trump. She and her husband, Sheldon Adelson, repeatedly spoke with Mr. Trump about foreign policy, including, in Mr. Adelson’s case, trade policy toward China. Just before Mr. Trump’s inauguration this year, Sands’s chief executive met with a Chinese vice minister to discuss trade and “the company’s growth in China,” according to Xinhua, China’s state news agency.

Mr. Dumont did not say when the N.B.A. came up in discussions. But he said his pitch to the government focused on making Macau a broader tourism destination, just as Mr. Xi wants.

“When we explain the context about using the N.B.A. to come to Macau and have it be a very prominent feature of tourism for the city, everyone was really excited,” he said.

Mr. Dumont said that Mr. Tsai, the Nets owner and Alibaba chairman, was “very supportive, and he’s been super helpful.” Nets executives also met with Chinese officials in recent years.

The Nets declined to comment, but Sunshine Rogers, the Nets’ vice president of global partnerships, told a Chinese news outlet in May that it was the N.B.A. team that “prioritizes the Chinese market the most.”

In December, three years after Mr. Dumont raised the idea, the league announced a deal to play preseason games in Macau.

Mr. Silver returned to China in March for the first time since 2019.

He said the N.B.A. and the Chinese government would need to be flexible in their renewed relationship. “If this is about ideological purity on either side,” he said in an interview, “it will never be achieved.”

Joy Dong contributed reporting from Hong Kong and Macau, Kevin Draper from Lawrence, Kan., and Tariq Panja from London. Sheelagh McNeill and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.