Inside the NBA's silent tension surrounding Daryl Morey

NOBODY SAW MUCH of Daryl Morey in the days after the Houston Rockets landed in Tokyo for the NBA's Japan Games. The Rockets' general manager confined himself to his room at the Ritz Carlton in Roppongi Hills during the team's six-day visit, spotted leaving for occasional jaunts to the Shake Shack located a half-mile away.

Morey had reason to shut himself inside. When he tweeted an image on Friday, Oct. 4, that read "Fight for Freedom, Stand With Hong Kong," a sequence of events ensued that upended the NBA and one of its most recognizable franchises.

Yet apart from a follow-up tweet on Sunday that declared his intention wasn't to offend Rockets fans and friends in China, Morey sequestered himself from public view. He didn't attend the Rockets' practice on Sunday. He skipped the team's basketball clinic for Japanese youth on Monday. And though they were staying in the same hotel, Morey and NBA commissioner Adam Silver never met face-to-face. With Silver in Tokyo for less than 48 hours amid a packed schedule of public events and crisis management, they conducted their conversations over the phone.

During the week that the NBA set up shop in Tokyo, the Ritz Carlton felt less like a luxury hotel than a diplomatic retreat where a high-stakes international negotiation hung in the balance. With each passing day, those on the ground sensed the tension compounding.

On Wednesday, a day after Silver followed up the NBA's initial tepid statement by backing every NBA employee's right to political expression, Morey got off the elevator in his trademark mock turtleneck and walked to the hotel's Lobby Lounge on the 45th floor. He looked haggard, an appearance that wasn't helped by his tatty beard, when he received one of the only people he would engage in Tokyo: Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri.

That Ujiri, who projects a statesmanlike persona, was Morey's executive counterpart in Tokyo was both coincidence and blessing. Ujiri has written op-eds on the kidnappings by terrorist organization Boko Haram and the Atlanta Hawks' Danny Ferry episode. He spoke out publicly against Donald Trump's characterization of "s---hole countries" in the developing world.

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