The CBA might have a flopping problem. Tianjin’s flopping against Qingdao last week was a big reason that game got so out of hand, and on Friday, we saw another incident involving one of the league’s high-profile players.
Watch as Guangsha guard Zhang Hanjun starts bleeding perilymph from his ear, causing him to lose all equilibrium, upon bodily contact with Beijing’s Stephon Marbury. Who comes out of this looking good?
The CBA, which models itself off the NBA and not FIBA, may want to enact the NBA’s anti-flopping rule. “Flops have no place in our game — they either fool referees into calling undeserved fouls or fool fans into thinking the referees missed a foul call,” the NBA’s VP of basketball operations Stu Jackson was quoted as saying. In China, they fool players into a sense of false dignity as well, actual accomplishment in place of deceit. So Chinese, a foreign observer, using sport as a window into culture, might think. Why open yourself — your league, your country — to that kind of humiliation?
Marbury received a technical foul. Beijing eventually won 113-96 behind his game-high 38 points.
