BEIJING – All is back to normal in Chinese professional basketball. Yi Jianlian is a champion again, yet he can’t get a sniff from the NBA – even after dominating throughout the season for the Guangdong Southern Tigers, who won the CBA championship by sweeping all three playoff rounds. Could Yi, who can now safely be called an NBA washout, be a replacement piece that could help one of several injury-riddled NBA teams in the playoffs? The answer that Yi’s camp has been
The Guangdong Southern Tigers and the Shandong Gold Lions met in Game 1 of the Chinese Basketball Association Finals last night, with the Southern Tigers taking an 88-81 win to go up 1-0 in the best-of-seven series. Despite it only being the first game, the result was crucial: In the CBA’s 1-2-2-2 setup where the lower-seeded team hosts the first game, the Tigers now head back home with a chance to take a commanding 3-0 lead if they can hold serve.
The 15-day, 24 hour barrage of firecrackers that start on chun jie (Chinese New Year) ended two nights ago to the relief of this now nearly deaf blogger as China celebrated the final night of the Lunar Festival, yuan xiao (Lantern Festival). Marking the 15th day and first full moon of the new year, the festival is the official end of the Spring Festival period… and of all of the loud firecrackers that are lit off in every corner of Beijing
With under a minute to go and a win out of reach, a defeated and frustrated Tracy McGrady pulled up with a muscle pull in his thigh, asked to be subbed out, and watched from the bench as his Qingdao Eagles lost 95-84 to the previously winless Jilin Northeast Tigers. [Read more…]
Nineteen points, eight rebounds and two blocks. To the casual eye, that reads as a pretty nice box score. But, for Wang Zhelin and Chinese basketball as a whole, it will remain as a historic stat line stuffed with something way more important than just numbers: Potential. By now, word of Wang’s impressive aforementioned performance has gotten around to basketball circles all around the world. In China, he’s getting some love for what is by far the best showing a Chinese player has ever