Jon Pastuszek of NiuBBall brings us this story via Tuesday's edition of Yangtze Evening Post: The Chinese Basketball Association is currently dealing with the threat of in-game point shaving, according to a report published yesterday in the Yangtze Evening Paper, which includes both foreign players and Chinese referees, the latter of whom can reportedly be bought out for CNY 50,000. Specifics are given: The ...

On Tuesday, Gilbert Arenas played his first game since November 24 -- when he pulled up lame after just six minutes in Beijing -- and it was apparent he wasn't completely healthy. He limped to the bench in the first half, fueling the same questions that reporters asked last month: is he physically fit to compete? Arenas would come back in the second half, but his skills, sadly, remained conspicuously absent ...

This weekend has not been good to Tracy McGrady. On Friday he suffered the indignity of having to run off the court because of diarrhea -- to say nothing of the indignity of a 10-point performance in a 30-point home loss. Yesterday in Beijing, against the defending champs, he was involved in what could have been an even dirtier play, when he intentionally elbowed Beijing's Ji Zhe early in the fourth quarter ...

Perhaps it's safe to say the excitement surrounding Tracy McGrady's arrival to Qingdao and the CBA's Double Star Eagles has worn off. In his debut, T-Mac got stripped clean with 10 seconds to go in a tie game, then watched Sundiata Gaines drill a buzzer-beater on the other end. Less than a week later, his team entered the fourth quarter with an 11-point lead against Bayi, only to lose it and then watch Chin ...

The script couldn't have been more perfect. Making his Chinese Basketball Association debut on national television, Tracy McGrady had the ball in his hands with only a three-second difference between the game and shot clock. His visiting Qingdao Double Star Eagles had erased a double-digit deficit and were all knotted at 92 with the Fujian Sturgeons. The home crowd roared, just as they had every time T-Mac ...

Saturday night’s CBA season opener brought out the stars. The world’s best badminton player, Lin Dan, and probably best female diver, Wu Minxia, were in attendance. Li Ning threw the ceremonial jump ball. Shanghai Sharks owner Yao Ming was in the stands. But the biggest attraction was on the floor, in the form of former Dream Teamers Stephon Marbury and Gilbert Arenas — two of only three Team USA Basketball ...

Before Beijing and Shanghai tipped off the 2012-13 Chinese Basketball Association season last night, there was a 30-minute pre-game ceremony in which players and coaches from last year's championship-winning team -- that would be the Beijing Ducks, if you're just joining in -- received medals, awards, and a championship banner. All that was normal. Then there was music in the form of Chinese folk rock, half ...

Qingdao had its final preseason tune-up on Tuesday away from its home court in Binzhou, Shandong province in a contest that probably wouldn't have filled half the arena if Tracy McGrady weren't in the house. McGrady scored five points in 2 minutes against a team of foreigners -- 98 seconds, to be exact -- then took a seat on the bench. He sat for the next 46 minutes, until the final buzzer. As Jon Pastuszek ...

After a series of false starts, three-time NBA All-Star Gilbert Arenas finally signed with the CBA's Shanghai Sharks. Even though he's been practicing with the team for a week, he was only officially unveiled on Monday. Reports NiuBBall's Jon Pastuszek, he has a one-year deal worth about $700,000 with an option for a second year if both team and player desires. Though the deal was expected to go through sin ...

As you know, former NBA superstar Tracy McGrady is in China and will be playing with the CBA's Qingdao Double Star Eagles this year. He's kind of a big deal. While this clip from practice (and the ones after the jump) probably won't tell you everything -- for instance, whether he'll stay healthy, which was a problem for him Stateside -- it's still fun to watch. After all, it's just him tooling on his teamma ...

The Bayi Rockets are the crown franchise of the Chinese Basketball Association, not because they're good -- they won 31 percent of their games last year -- or particularly likable -- as Jim Yardley wrote in Grantland after Bayi brawled with Georgetown last year, "Anti-Bayi sentiment [at one time] was so deep that rumors began to circulate of counter conspiracies in which other teams were colluding, delibera ...

China's love of basketball most wondrously expresses itself in the way fans welcome aging former stars from the NBA. You, basketball aficionado, might call Tracy McGrady an oft-injured and washed-up bench player, but here, they call him a megawatt superstar, Yao Ming's former teammate, and now Qingdao's most famous resident. He will be playing with the CBA's Double Star Eagles this season, and there is hope ...

Allen Iverson and Jason "White Chocolate" Williams were among the more famous basketball players in Beijing on Saturday to take on the defending CBA champs in an exhibition at Beijing National Stadium. (No Dennis Rodman this time.) The Ducks beat the American "All-Stars" 132-103, but all anyone could talk about afterwards was the "juke" that Iverson put on the Ducks' 22-year-old guard, Fang Shuo, just befor ...

While Stephon Marbury usually commands all the attention, Beijing has a pretty good second foreigner on its basketball team in Randolph Morris. Last year the 6'11'' power forward/center averaged 23.8 points and 7.1 rebounds over the season, and hit the go-ahead free throws with 21.9 seconds left in the championship-clinching Game 5 vs. Guangdong in March. The team re-signed him in the off-season, and yester ...

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 an ...

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 the 2010 American science fiction film 'Tron: Legacy.'" That does sound amazing, ac ...

In the wake of the "British rapist" and Russian cellist, this won't help Chinese-foreigner relations: a basketball team called the New Orleans Hurricanes -- possibly this one from Texas -- was in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province yesterday for an exhibition against the Zhejiang Guangsha Lions that ended in the worst way possible. In the above video (and below, on Youku, for those in China), players from the two si ...

UPDATE, 9:37 am: My headline originally misidentified the gender of the person holding the "kids" sign (upon closer inspection, as pointed out in the comments section, the person holding the sign does not look to be a dude after all). Everything makes a lot more sense now, though at the cost of being funny. Allen Iverson and his touring teammates landed in Taiyuan, Shanxi yesterday, a place with notoriously ...

Former NBA stars Allen Iverson and Dennis Rodman were in Cixi, Zhejiang earlier this week to scrimmage against the Beijing Ducks, which still has (the newly minted) Stephon Marbury, as part of an eight-game, multi-team tour. One Beijing player said it was a dream to play against AI. Ducks coach Min Lulei, however, had no use for such sentiment. He chided his team in the post-game press conference for not ta ...

I don't think we'll be posting any more CBA videos for a while after this. It's fitting, then, that the above video is a highlight package of the final game of the season, played last Friday. The video after the jump is a segment that BTV put together for team translator and sometimes equipment manager Wang Lan (lots of people get very emotional during these six minutes). Both of the clips are from the BTV ...