The Mavericks have retained Kyrie Irving and are searching for their third head coach since 2021, which means the Adelson family, whose Las Vegas Sands operations across Macau and Singapore posted $11.7 billion in net revenue in fiscal 2024, now owns a basketball franchise whose most visible remaining China asset is a player whose jersey-sale value became commercially unauditable in 2023, when Nike declined to renew his contract.

There is a Kyrie Irving jersey in the window of a sports goods shop on Granville Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. Pale blue. Has been there a while. Jon Scheyer, Duke's head coach, leads the reported candidate list for the vacancy Jason Kidd left, alongside a shorter field of NBA assistants whose shared credential is that none of them ran a Luka Doncic-era Dallas roster. The Adelson family's majority purchase in 2023 was valued at $3.5 billion. Irving's Nike contract ending that same year removed the instrument that makes a player's China-market worth legible on an outside ledger. Nico Harrison has the ninth pick, the coaching search, and the Irving question running simultaneously; the June 22 draft is the only one of those with a fixed deadline.