What does Gilbert Arenas, three-time NBA All-Star, do before CBA games in Shanghai? Watch YouTube, of course. We know this thanks to Donald Mahoney of the video series Donnie Does. "I watched you on YouTube before I got here," Arenas tells Donnie in the tunnel before a Sharks home game. "You're funny as shit." "How you liking Shanghai?" "It's fun." "Let's grab a beer sometime." ...

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 upon bodily contact with Beijing's Stephon Marbury. Who comes out of this looking good? ...

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 ...

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 ...

Fans lined up around the massive Zhongguancun Book Mansion this morning to see their favorite athlete, Stephon Marbury, conduct a book signing for his ghostwritten autobiography, I Am Commissar Marbury (I only assume it's ghostwritten because it's in Chinese). Marbury, who had been in the US for foot surgery, returned to Beijing on Thursday with his daughter. He didn't appear to be super excited, but we'll ...

There's nothing wrong with following porn stars on Twitter, as China Daily has taught us. To wit, Stephon Marbury of Starbury fame --point guard of the Beijing Ducks, the CBA's current champions -- follows these lovely ladies, as revealed by Buzzfeed: ...

Stephon Marbury may never make it onto the cover of Sports Illustrated (unless Sports Illustrated China counts), but he has made it onto the front page of Beijing Evening News, seen above. I hope I'm not burying the lead here, but he also has his own life-sized statue. Stephon Marbury does. A bronze effigy. When we glimpsed it earlier this month, I speculated over where it would be placed (surely in Tian'an ...

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 ...

Starbury has a statue in China. ...

[caption id="attachment_1996" align="alignnone" width="350" caption="Via hoopchina.com/hupu.com"][/caption] Look at that thing above. Face. Palm. Yes, it's only a clay model and not the statue itself, but how unbefitting. The pose is nondescript -- he's a thumb-tuck away from being a football referee signaling a touchdown -- and it's not as if the moment that he lifted the trophy was somehow worth memoriali ...

The day after Beijing won the CBA championship, BTV hosted the official victory celebration -- the equivalent of a parade for a professional sports team in the US -- in the form of a show called 一赛季, 一生情, which I'll roughly translate as "One Season, One Lifetime of Passion." There were several interesting parts, such as the interview with coach Min Lulei in which he admits the wear of the season has finally ...

By Jon Pastuszek It's November 2010, and Stephon Marbury has locked himself inside a hotel room in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, sad, hurt and uncertain over his future in China. Eight months earlier, after basically being told he wasn't welcome anymore in the NBA, he had come to play for the Shanxi Brave Dragons of the Chinese Basketball Association. American media cackled at this desperate move from a despera ...

They kept trying to jinx it, I swear to God they did. Before tonight's game, the club gave away t-shirts (white, per Stephon Marbury's suggestion) that read, "March 30, 2012: Beijing Ducks are champions." With 21.9 seconds left, Beijing up two and Guangdong set to inbound, the crowd chanted, "Championship! Championship!" ...

Jon Pastuszek over at NiuBBall has added an incredible detail in a post titled "Beijing-Guangdong Game 1: The night the CBA was at its best and worst" (first uncovered among English-language China blogs by China Sports Review): Yet the most amazing was that [Guangdong] Coach Li, a man who has won seven CBA championships, was the one who ordered the hit. One good thing about CBA telecasts (and there are few, ...

At the 52-second mark of this Youku video, which accompanies yesterday's post titled “Watch This Dirty, Dirty Foul On Stephon Marbury, Followed By Some Shithead Telling Him, 'Fuck You,'” one hears a sudden crackling sound before the stream suddenly stops. It doesn't start again until the 1:45 mark, after China national-team member Su Wei has stopped telling Marbury "Fuck you, fuck you." In the comments sect ...

The CBA employs a 1-2-2-2 finals format, meaning the team with the worse record starts Game 1 at home. Theoretically it leads to longer series, but that's incumbent on the home team actually winning Game 1. Beijing, as the heavy underdogs against the four-time defending champs, was in a must-win situation on Wednesday, playing for the first time at Olympic-quality Wukesong. Embedded above and after the jump ...

Youku video for those in China after the jump. [UPDATE, 3/23: Did Youku just censor my video? Embedded below is now the video on 56.com.][UPDATE 2: Well fuck, 56.com and Tudou have rejected my video as well. Hang on while I find a host that doesn't employ censors bored as shit and behaving like craven cunts.][UPDATE 3: Ku6.com to the rescue.] The announcers were all over this one. “This was obvious... he ha ...

Youku video for those in China after the jump Stephon Marbury has had his rebirth, his redemption, and now his catharsis -- in the form of a good, long cry. In the waning moments of Sunday's Game 5, which saw Beijing oust Shanxi to claim its first CBA finals appearance in its 17-year history, cameras appeared to catch Marbury shedding a few tears on the court. But it was in the tunnels afterwards -- the bat ...

Video -- plus more photos (all via Sina) -- after the jump. There he was at the end, the clock frozen at 15.9 seconds even though the ball had been inbounded, hugging teammate and captain Chen Lei. If this were a movie these two would have been at mid-court to soak in the moment, but no matter -- they were still cynosure of all eyes, the captain who barely recovered from injury for this postseason and the 3 ...