Money talks, and that whole thing

Look, what do I know. ("Finally! He admits it!" you're saying.) We've reached a point, in a nation that has lost its mind and its compass in service to a mad king, that the Blob wouldn't know a principled stand if it stood on the Blob's foot while wearing clown shoes.

So forgive me if I listened to what NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the other day, and heard nothing but the sound of a powerful man being knuckled.

Yes, OK, so he said the Association wasn't going to apologize for Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey giving an attaboy to protestors in Hong Kong, which got China's shorts in a twist. But then he said they were going to apologize for the reaction and bad feeling it provoked. So what exactly was the message here?

The Blob thinks it knows.

The Blob thinks it was all about dollar signs, because most of the time these things are. The NBA sees immense wads of cash in the Asian market, particularly China, which is why it's trying to cultivate that market. And so while it's nice and all that Silver is standing up, sort of, for his employees' right to speak their minds ...

Well. Ahem.

In the meantime, the Rockets owner issues a strongly worded disavowal of his own GM. And Silver is still headed to China, and the two preseason games scheduled there tomorrow are still on, even though the Chinese have retaliated for Morey's impertinence by canceling TV coverage of the games and pulling the plug on a couple of NBA Cares events in the country.

Sorry, but this doesn't look like much of a principled stand to me. This looks more like Silver sort of half-rising from his chair, muttering some squeaky words about freedom of speech, then quickly sitting back down before the Chinese can get torqued off again.

You know what would be an actual principled stand?

If the NBA were to respond to China's clear dissing of its goodwill tour by canceling the two scheduled preseason games. Because, listen, China isn't the only power player in the room here. The NBA, with its near-global reach, has some considerable weight to throw around, too.

So here's what the Association should say: "You want to get all pissy with us? Fine. You can all play soccer, then. We'd love to have the billions and billions your market presents to us, but it's not like we need it. We've never kept our people from speaking their minds, and we're not going to start now.

"Deal with it. Or not. Frankly, we really don't care."

I know, I know. That's not realistic. And it's not how the NBA got where it's gotten. And money is always, always, going to out-shout everything else, world without end, amen.

So neither Adam Silver nor anyone else affiliated with the Association is going to say anything remotely like that. They're just not.

But, damn. It would be beautiful if they did, wouldn't it?