Silver frustrated there are no Chinese players in NBA

Commissioner Adam Silver's vision is to make basketball the global sport, but there currently aren't any representatives from the NBA's biggest prospective market.

Silver expressed his frustration Thursday at the league's lack of Chinese players prior to Game 1 of The Finals.

"It frustrates me that there are no Chinese players in the NBA right now," he told reporters, according to ASAP Sports. "There's probably more basketball being played in China than anywhere else in the world. And more basketball is being watched, more NBA basketball is being watched, in China than anywhere else in the world.

"And it's something I talked to Yao Ming a lot about, and I think ultimately that we all collectively have to do a better job training the best players in China. Sort of relates to the earlier question even about American players. But how we can train Chinese players to ultimately compete at the highest level in the NBA."

Silver revealed he's working with the Hall of Fame center to establish better development programs in China to tap into the world's largest populace for basketball talent.

"I've made this point before, and Yao has made it to me, that when you look at Lithuania, when you look at Serbia, when you look at Latvia, countries that have populations of less than 10 million, and all three of those countries with several NBA players, how can it be that a country of 1.3 billion people where there's an enormous amount of basketball being played has no NBA players right now."

There are no Chinese players in the NBA at the moment. Zhou Qi and Wang Zhelin were drafted by the Houston Rockets and Memphis Grizzlies, respectively, in the second round of the 2016 draft, but both are still playing in the Chinese Basketball Association. Jeremy Lin is American-born and of Taiwanese descent.