Monday's event was the latest chapter in the NBA's special relationship with China - over three decades since the league first aired game highlights here in 1987. Since then, it has committed to growing basketball here through talent cultivation, youth development and charity as part of its overall effort to make hoops the No 1 sport in the world's most populous nation.

According to league figures, 642 million Chinese watched NBA programming over the course of the 2017-2018 season. That's almost double the population of the United States.

At last year's NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers, China Central Television managed to attract 25 million viewers per game, while the ongoing finals series between the Warriors and the Toronto Raptors this year has already stirred a new wave of passion.

The NBA is now the most-followed sports league on Chinese social media, with over 190 million followers on multiple platforms.

Despite lacking a Chinese star to fill the void left by the retirement of Hall of Famer Yao Ming in 2011, the league's presence in China has become even stronger - no matter how relations between the two countries change politically or economically.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver said his league will always be on the same page as the Chinese Basketball Association in developing the game together.

"This is something Yao and I have discussed, where we can use basketball maybe in the way ping pong was used back in the day, that there could be something called basketball diplomacy. It is an area where our two countries have an excellent history of cooperation," Silver said recently, referring to the exchange of table tennis players between China and the United States in the early 1970s that led to a thaw in Sino-US relations.

The exchange of talent on the basketball court has become an ever-present element of the NBA's strategy in China.