(Bloomberg) -- China’s CCTV is sticking to its pledge to drop National Basketball Association coverage two weeks after a league official’s twitter post roiled its business in the mainland.

The state broadcaster’s sports channel CCTV-5 -- which averaged 25 million viewers per game during previous NBA finals -- has no plans to air the opening games, the first time it has not covered regular season games in at least a decade.

There are no NBA games scheduled for broadcast on CCTV this week, according to its website, although there will be more than 30 games played in the U.S. between teams like the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers as the season kicks off.

But in a sign of the enduring interest from Chinese fans -- 500 million of whom watched one or more games last year -- Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. live-streamed games from Wednesday. Tencent had announced its boycott of pre-season games as well at the height of the controversy earlier this month, but resumed live-streaming of games beginning Oct 14.

NBA’s Silver Says China Crisis Brought ‘Substantial’ Losses

The NBA was plunged into turmoil earlier this month after the Houston Rockets’ general manager, Daryl Morey, posted a tweet in support of pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong. He soon deleted the message, but China took umbrage and the NBA’s sponsors in the country cut ties with the league.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver further inflamed tensions at the time by supporting Morey’s right to free speech, telling reporters that the league wouldn’t police what people can say.

The fall-out from the tweet has paralyzed the league’s operations in its biggest market outside of the U.S. The NBA is the most popular American sports league in the world’s most populous country and its business there is already a billion-dollar enterprise.

In an interview with Forbes in March, NBA China CEO Derek Chang said that regular season games previously averaged four million viewers on CCTV and three million on Tencent, even though an 8 p.m. game in New York tips off at 9 a.m. the next day in China.

This isn’t the first time China has halted NBA broadcasts. They were suspended for several months in 1999 after U.S. bombs hit the China embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists. Other halts took place in 2001 and 2008, sparked by geopolitical conflicts like tensions over the South China Sea.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jinshan Hong in Hong Kong at jhong214@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rachel Chang at wchang98@bloomberg.net

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