LeBron James arrived in Beijing yesterday to kick off his four-day promotional tour through China, and there’s a video after his jump of his rather… theatrical first public appearance. The activity was FindYourGreatness, sponsored by Nike, held in Chaoyang Gymnasium. Fast-forward past the acrobats to the 2:30 mark to watch LeBron make his exalted entrance, barely noticing... Read more »
Via The Basketball Jones First, the picture, taken on Thursday in Wuhan as part of Kobe Bryant’s annual Nike tour: it is ridiculous. Reports the LA Times: This is the seventh summer in a row that Bryant has visited China, including the 2008 Beijing Olympics. On this trip, according to published accounts, Bryant has hosted training clinics... Read more »
Australia beat Brazil 70-66 yesterday to clinch a spot in the quarterfinals, but all anyone is talking about is Liz Cambage's dunk, which people are agreeing is the first-ever in women's basketball in the Olympics.
The refs plain botched this. Chinese commentators during the game — one of whom was Yao Ming — speculated that maybe none of the three refs on the court — all of them staring at the play — could believe Serge Ibaka could actually do this — jump, bounce the ball, come down with it,... Read more »
The Jordan brand is producing a series of mini-documentaries about basketball around the world, with the inspirational hashtag #RISEABOVE. Of course they had to go to China, and of course they had to borrow the narrative from Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea: lone traveler finds himself in remote part of the world; traveler is injured, healed by "shaman"; traveler returns to isolated village to build something Western -- a basketball court, in this case. But don't let the fact that this is essentially an infomercial to sell shoes discourage you too much. It's a nicely produced video, and check out the moves on some of these kids.
The National Basketball League (NBL) is a semi-pro basketball league managed by the same suits who control the top-tier Chinese Basketball Association (CBA). The NBL's playoffs are currently happening, but they're not happening very well. As Jon Pastuszek of NiuBBall reports, "I invite you to keep an eye on the NBL playoffs, where not one, but two all-out brawls went down inside of three days last Friday and Sunday."
I’m ashamed to admit that I missed this Shanghai Daily article from Saturday announcing a partnership between the NBA and Shanghai Film Group to produce Amazing. It “tells the story of a fictional world known as ‘The Sixth Sense.’ It uses basketball imagery to combine the visual elements of a video game with a movie, akin to... Read more »
