As the NBA has emerged as the first professional league in the US to cozy up to global sport’s burgeoning class of nation-state investors, the shape of its guiding dualism under Silver is starting to become crisper: lip service to social justice issues at home, a studied obliviousness to human rights violations abroad. In the contest between ethics and numbers, it’s now becoming clear that the latter matter far more to the NBA than the former.

Basketball was the first of the country’s big professional sports leagues to break open America’s convention of restricting team ownership to extremely rich individuals; baseball and hockey have since followed suit, but basketball got there first. (The NFL has not yet relaxed its rules to allow private equity investment, though that may change when the league gathers for its annual meeting in Orlando, Florida next month.)