Winning come with perks. After leading the Beijing Ducks to their first Chinese Basketball Association championship, Stephon Marbury was honored with a statue. Then he got a book deal. After championship No. 2, he was made an honorary citizen of Beijing. After championship no. 3, in which he was selected MVP, he’s now on a Chinese postage stamp.

On Saturday, the stamps were revealed in a ceremony at the National Museum of China. Marbury was quoted in Xinhua:

“I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that people will be able to buy a stamp of me to mail packages anywhere in the world,” said Marbury, who plans to give a speech at the National Museum of China in Beijing.

“I am truly humbled. Never did I imagine in all of my 38 years of living that I – a kid who grew up 7,000 miles away from Beijing and a kid who came from the projects of Coney Island – would have a stamp of myself. I can never have dreamed it.”

Xinhua also reports that the Coney Island native has applied for a Chinese green card.

More pictures of the stamps are here.

At this point, I’d be shocked if the Stephon Marbury movie isn’t released in Chinese theaters within five years.

Don’t look now, but a basketball dynasty is blossoming in Beijing, and the only man who was brash enough to dream it — to, indeed, articulate that dream — was the pride of Coney Island, Stephon Marbury.

“I said we wanted to build a dynasty here in Beijing,” Marbury told reporters in the locker room following the Beijing Ducks’ series-clinching Game 6 win over Liaoning, 106-98, on the opponent’s court. “A lot of people said that I was crazy for saying that, but I believed in my teammates, I believed in Coach Min, I believed in the Beijing organization. We’ve done everything in our power to make this work. To be able to be in this light right now, I’m just thankful and I’m just humble.”

(Before that: “The real men will rise. The real men will rise. I just want to thank my God Jesus Christ for giving me the light to do all the things that I’ve been able to do. It’s been beautiful journey in Beijing, baby. They said I was old, they said I can’t play no more, the critics said I can’t do it no more — it’s all good. It’s all good, baby. Can I get my championship shirt, please?”)

Marbury — and I can’t emphasize this enough — was unstoppable all series, as he has been all postseason, as he has been all season, and every season in which he’s played in China. There were no tears this time, just a lot of joy and the relief of ending a season on top. The Ducks have now won three of the last four titles, including the last two.

Marbury again: “I want to say congratulations to Liaoning, those guys played a great season throughout the whole year, they’re a really good team, they’re going to be tough in the future, but the real men rose today, and that’s just all that happened today.”

The 38-year-old (!) guard was selected finals MVP, the first time he’s won the honor. (In the Ducks’ first title win in 2012, a rule prevented foreigners from winning MVP, though everyone knew Marbury deserved it. Last year, his teammate Randolph Morris earned it.) Here he is with his handprint plaque:

Check out the following highlight reel, in which Marbury goes Jordan on everyone. It truly has been a delight to watch:

(Images via Sina, Sohu)

The Xinjiang Flying Tigers may have lost the CBA championship to the Beijing Ducks, but Xinjiangers around the world came away from the games with a powerful meme. It came at the end of Game 5, after the Tigers rallied and pulled off an improbable win in front of a hostile Beijing crowd of 18,000. Shiralijan, the star Uyghur point guard for the Tigers who had been tasked with defending Stephan Marbury — the star of the Ducks (and best player in the league, according to Anthony Tao!) –threw the ball in the air and raised a twirling, emphatic fist:

He punched the air with his right hand while his left hand grabbed his bicep. Relating the gesture to the semiotics on the Uyghur countryside where he’s from, most Uyghur onlookers immediately interpreted the gesture as a “fuck you” to the crowd that had been chanting “East Turkistan stupid cunt,” or “DongTu shabi,”¹ for the past three days. According to some Uyghur observers, Shiralijan was reacting as any self-respecting minority might to targeted ethnic slurs.

As a Uyghur friend put it in reaction to the situation:

I think he probably meant ‘f you’ when he did that gesture. Many Uyghurs understood it as that, whatever his original intention was, because in Uyghur culture it only has that one meaning. Period. I didn’t even know about the meaning of the middle finger until I came to college. That was the main gesture that Uyghur kids used with each other when I was a kid. I think that is why my friends and many other Uyghurs found it brave that Shirlijan did it in front of thousands of Han. I am sure other gestures of victory would not attract such attention. His status as a Uyghur also brought undue attention to it.

After the fact, the Beijing Ducks were fined 40,000 yuan for being “uncivilized.” Shiralijan said he didn’t realize that his fist was a vulgar gesture. He said he was merely imitating the gesture of a character in the animated film One Piece. He was given a warning regarding his “unsportsmanlike conduct.”

Regardless of his intent, his gesture went viral on Xinjiang social media. Kids mimicked the gesture; Uyghur “uncles” from the countryside offered their fists to the camera; young men who self-describe as balangzi (“wolfish,” or cocksure young men) punched the sky; even Han fans of Shiralijan² posed for group portraits.

Sports apparel manufacturer Li Ning has put out an ad featuring Shiralijan asking sports fans not to discriminate against the culturally different. They said that what Shiralijan expressed represented the collective defiance of Xinjiang spirit (Shinjang rohi in Uyghur).

In comment sections, Beijing fans talked about how uneducated Shiralijan must be and that he should be taught a lesson. Xinjiang fans talked about how proud they were that Shiralijan stood up like a bad ass. Sports promoted conversation, and might have — just might have — fostered some understanding…

In the days that followed, many of their comments were deleted.

¹ Ch: 东突傻屄. By raising the specter of “East Turkistan” the crowd was associating Shiralijan with “the three evil forces” that so often pervades discussions of Xinjiang, not to mention the fact that they are saying he is a stupid cunt.

² A commentator on WeChat refers to them as neidiren, or people from “inner” China, but I’m not convinced.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

After leading Beijing to its first Chinese Basketball Association championship two years ago, Stephon Marbury was given his own bronze statue. We wondered, after his second CBA title, how Beijing would honor its adopted Coney Island point guard, and now we know: by giving him a key to the city.

As CRI English reports:

The Honorary Citizen award aims to recognize and acknowledge the contributions made by foreigners, overseas Chinese and people from Hong Kong and Macao towards the development of the city.

Marbury was honored in a ceremony attended by Beijing mayor Wang Anshun, pictured above. Here he is showing off his key as Beijing’s newest citizen:

Afterwards he went on social media to praise the fans:

The key of the city of BEIJING belongs to the people. I’m thankful that you opened your hearts to me when I first entered the country. The love has stayed consistent and I’m blessed to be here. #LOVE IS LOVE#

Interestingly enough, while he’s been posting consistently on Weibo, his Twitter account has been quiet since March 20. (Twitter’s blocked in China of course, but one figures Marbury has a VPN.) Maybe he simply realizes where his supporters are:

Marbury Becomes Honorary Citizen of Beijing (CRI)

The Beijing Ducks won the CBA championship last night in Xinjiang, beating the Flying Tigers 98-88 in Game 6. Here are some photos and a video of the celebration. The top image, by the way, is now Stephon Marbury’s profile pic on Sina Weibo:

After the game, Marbury wrote on Sina Weibo about beginning a basketball dynasty in Beijing:

We’ve written about this before, of course, but let’s reiterate how far Starbury has come from New York. The man who never before won a basketball championship at any level is now a two-time champ, and all it took was traveling to the other side of the world.

This season was especially tough, as Marbury — inarguably the most valuable player the Ducks have ever had, and probably the most valuable to any team in the CBA — flew back to the US for knee surgery in November. Already universally beloved by teammates, coaches, and fans — he’s on the short list of candidates to coach the Chinese national team whenever he chooses to retire (this is not a joke) — we wonder what other plaudits can be thrown his way. Maybe a second statue outside Wukesong is in the works. (If it doesn’t go to his running mate Randolph Morris, whose deadly midrange jumpers earned him finals MVP honors.)

What will the next act bring?

UPDATE, 4/4, 4:08 pm: Marbury’s been given a key to Beijing and made an honorary citizen.

Top picture via here, bottom pictures here (both CFP/Sina)

Beijing is again king of Chinese basketball. The Ducks beat the Xinjiang Flying Tigers 98-88 tonight in Urumqi, clinching the CBA championship 4 games to 2. Stephon Marbury and Randolph Morris, who played so shockingly poorly in Game 5 in Beijing that I heard more than one person say they threw the game (14 points each, combined 7 for 38 from the field), redeemed themselves by scoring 28 and 30 points, respectively. Morris was chosen series MVP (a recent rule change now lets foreigners win this award, traditionally reserved for Chinese players only).

Inside the locker room after the game, Marbury sat and sobbed into a towel while members of an overzealous media crowded around him. “Beijing is champs!” players shouted.

There were no demonstrable gestures on the court, unlike at the conclusion of Game 5, when Xinjiang’s Muhtar Xirelijiang did this.

The Ducks also won in 2011-12, their first basketball championship. (Marbury was clearly the MVP that year, though the award went to Lee Hsueh-lin.) They lost in the semis last year to the Shandong Lions.

Meanwhile, this marks the fourth time in six years that the Xinjiang Flying Tigers have lost in the CBA finals. The team finished second in the regular season this year, behind the Guangdong Southern Tigers (who Beijing beat in the semis). Xinjiang’s quest for its first CBA title will have to wait one more year.

We’ll have more coverage — pictures and videos — tomorrow. UPDATE: 3/31, 4:15 pm: here.

(Top image via Sina)

Believe it or not, a 37-year-old point guard from Coney Island, New York who played 13 years in the NBA is putting the city of Beijing on his back.

With one CBA championship on his resume — and a statue outside MasterCard Center — Stephon Marbury already is a Chinese basketball living legend. So what happens if he wins another, all while averaging 28 points per game this postseason on a bum knee?

We’re three Beijing Ducks victories away from finding out. On Wednesday night, the Ducks dominated on the road in Game 1 of the CBA finals, beating the Xinjiang Flying Tigers — who were 4.5-point favorites — 95-75.

This comes on the heels of the Ducks’ upset of the Guangdong Southern Tigers, dubbed the “Miami Heat of China.” Marbury, whose official nickname is “Political Commissar Ma,” took over that series, including scoring 43 points in a Game 3 win.

Beijing fans have taken notice. Today marked the official ticket launch for Games 3 (March 23) and 4 (March 25) in Beijing. It’s been reported that a total of 225,000 fans attempted to buy the 16,000 available tickets, crashing the online system.

The Ducks, along with their marketing affiliates iRENA World, are hosting a Game 2 viewing event on Friday at Gala (located between gates 21 and 22 of Workers Stadium at Gongti). Doors open at 6:30 pm for the 7:30 pm tipoff. It’s free, and probably your best place to root on the hometown team.

The professional basketball team in Beijing is called the Ducks, but I don’t see why. It should be the Beijing Stephon Marburies. There is no player more valuable to his team — not Yi Jianlian for Guangdong, not Doug McDermott for Creighton, not even LeBron James for Miami — than Marbury is to Beijing, and if you needed any proof, just fire up last night’s decisive Game 5 of the CBA semifinals, which saw the Ducks beat the Guangdong Southern Tigers 110-102 in Dongguan.

It’s not just the numbers: 31 points (on 9 for 15 shooting), 5 assists, 5 rebounds, 2 steals (and fouled 11 times). It’s that when Marbury’s on the court, the Ducks resemble a professional basketball team. Defenders get spread out and put on their heels. And it’s the way the veteran — now in his fifth year in China — carries himself on the court, never scowling at his teammates or losing his focus despite getting his arms chopped every other possession.

When Marbury sits — as he had to for the start of the second quarter last night — the Ducks fall apart. Plain and simple.

Last night could have been a disaster. Zhu Yanxi somehow racked up four fouls in less than 20 minutes. Li Gen was his usual tofu-with-limbs self. Ji Zhe continued to shrink into his own head. Randolph Morris seemed more interested in pouting and fighting — here he is literally punching Dong Hanlin in the second quarter, which could have warranted an ejection and cost Beijing the game. Point guard Lee Hsueh-lin kept passing like he was throwing a bowling ball. The Ducks had a 29-21 lead after the first quarter and then raced out to 40 points, but — against a stifling full-court press that no one seemed able to break — stalled there and seemed in danger of crumbling.

Marbury had to be subbed back in. (The CBA limits the combined court time for a team’s foreigners, so Morris had to sit — though he was playing so poorly, he should have anyway.) Immediately, the game changed. Guangdong called off its press — it wouldn’t play it again all game, since Marbury is arguably the best ball handler in the league — and Beijing regained control of the tempo. The Ducks led 48-44 at intermission — Marbury hit the final shot just before the buzzer, of course — the first halftime lead they’d had all series, and there was a palpable sense that Marbury was not going to let his team falter.

The 37-year-old, on a surgically repaired knee, continued to dominate over the course of the next 24 minutes. (He would log a game-high 40 minutes and 27 seconds. Did we mention surgically repaired knee?) As time bled away in the fourth quarter with the Ducks clinging to a six-, then four-point lead, Marbury continually took it to the bucket, enduring the blatant hacking of both Zhou Peng — who is easily the most detestable basketball player I’ve ever witnessed — and Yi Jianlian. Yi, it should be noted, is a wonderful competitor, but he absolutely had no idea how to keep Marbury in front of him on the perimeter.

Guangdong was unable to duplicate its perimeter shooting success from Game 4, and Beijing iced the game from the free throw line. Somehow, inexplicably, the road team won the final three games in this series. (Beijing won Game 3 in Dongguan behind Marbury’s 43 points.) For the first time in 12 years, the Guangdong Southern Tigers will be watching the CBA finals from home.

The best-of-seven finals will open next Wednesday at 7:35 pm in Xinjiang, home of the Flying Tigers, who finished second in the regular season standings (26-8) behind Guangdong.

Images via Sina:

One from Sohu:

Here’s the reception the Ducks received when they arrived home today. The top picture is the cutest.

Stephon Marbury may have turned in his finest CBA performance — and it came against the best team in the league, the defending CBA champion Guangdong Southern Tigers. With his head bandaged for the last four minutes of the fourth quarter and through overtime — the result of a gash sustained during one of his trademark drives to the basket — the 37-year-old finished Saturday night with 43 points on 13-for-20 shooting (including 4-for-8 from behind the arc). He was fouled 13 times, hitting all but one of his 14 free throws. The Beijing Ducks won 109-104.

Marbury posted to Sina Weibo afterwards: “No matter what it takes. Bloody head surgically repaired knee bruised thigh the mission must be complete.” It was a typically physical contest between these old rivals – Beijing beat Guangdong 4 games to 1 to win the CBA championship two years ago – as the teams combined for 62 fouls (33 on Guangdong, 29 on Beijing).

The win puts Beijing one game away from the CBA finals. The Ducks lead 2 to 1 in the best-of-five series, with the next contest at home at Wukesong — the NBA-quality arena built for the Olympics — tomorrow at 7:35 pm. The game will be broadcast on CCTV-5. If you’re wondering whether to tune in, I’ll go ahead and tell you the answer is yes. (UPDATE: Swing by BJC tomorrow for a live-blog of the game, with updates sent in from press row by Nick Bedard.)

Beijing’s Randolph Morris scored 33 points on Saturday, though he needed 30 shots to get those. (He also missed some late free throws that had everyone grimacing.) Needless to say — though Guangdong’s coach said it after the game — if Beijing’s two foreigners combine for 76 points, the team’s going to be hard to beat.

Guangdong’s Yi Jianlian scored a team-high 29 in a losing effort.

The winner of this series goes on to face Xinjiang, which finished a 3-0 sweep of Dongguan on Sunday on its home court in Urumqi.

Some pictures via Sina:

After sitting out more than two months with an injury and missing 22 games, Beijing Ducks superstar point guard Stephon Marbury returned to the court last night against the Shandong Flaming Bulls in his team’s first game of the new lunar year.

It was an eventful night, to say the very least.

With 35 seconds remaining in the third quarter, Marbury uses his patented NYC crossover to beat Sui Ran (#1) to the bucket, but as he goes up for a layup, his shoulder appears to slam into Ran’s face. (Watch: 1:30 mark in the video above, 1:45 mark below.)

Ran’s teammate, Wu Ke (#15), then delivers an elbow at Marbury, and all hell proceeds to break loose inside Beijing’s Shougang Arena.

Marbury whirls around and shoves Wu while unleashing a half-punch that kind of lands around Wu Ke’s chest (there’s a massive height difference, with Marbury at 185 centimeters and Wu Ke at 210).

As officials sort things out, Wu receives a rousing chant of “shabi! shabi!” from the crowd (literally, “stupid cunt,” though a better translation within this context would be “asshole”), along with a few plastic bottles hurled his direction. I was right there under the basket, and it was madness. From my vantage point, it threatened at times to get out of control.

Fans become all the more aggravated when officials announce that Marbury has been ejected from the game. He was assessed a technical foul on the initial drive to the hoop (a confusing, terrible call), then another technical for throwing a punch.

There’s more to this story: while officials were sorting out free throws, Shandong forward Donnell Harvey engaged Marbury’s trainer in a bit of trash talk, with the two apparently agreeing to meet after the game to throw down.

The Ducks won 99-95.

Afterwards, players and personnel from both teams began shoving while heading down to their respective dressing rooms. I saw a Chinese player from Shandong punch Marbury’s interpreter in the face during the post-game scuffle.

Fans blocked Shandong’s bus afterwards, because that’s just what happens. Marbury and many of his teammates have seen it firsthand.

Nick Bedard writes the blog Basketball Buddha. Follow him on Twitter @bedardnick. (Pictures via Sina [here and here.])

Of course he does. He’s going to be the coach of Chinese basketball someday, after all.

“Love is love,” it says.

(Via Basketball Buddha)

Panagiotis Giannakis, former head coach of the Greek basketball team, arrived in May to begin a four-year contract to lead the Chinese basketball team through the 2014 FIBA World Championships in Spain and the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. As of this writing, however — following a blowout loss to Chinese Taipei in the quarterfinals of the FIBA Asia Championship two weeks ago — it doesn’t look like Giannakis will survive the month. (China may not qualify for Spain or Brazil, either, but let’s leave this unmentioned for now.)

Immediately following the Chinese Taipei defeat — a team that China’s never lost to before — reporters began speculating that Giannakis would be fired. China’s basketball federation isn’t known for its patience. The embattled Greek coach gave everyone even more reason to doubt his future recently when he publicly snubbed a handshake from an important basketball official — skip ahead to the 2:55 mark in the embedded video to see it.

The person who extends his hand is none other than the deputy director of the Chinese national team, Hu Jiashi.

“I love Chinese basketball,” Giannakis then says. “And I hope to come back. So thank you for everything, xiexie, I’ll see you soon.”

Hope, maybe, but Giannakis doesn’t sound like someone who’s expecting to keep his job. How quickly things change. Only two months ago, Hu was publicly praising his new hire:

“This first month was a period of both sides adapting to each other. The players are adapting to him and he’s adapting to the players,” Hu said. “Looking at how things have started, Giannakis is doing a good job. He’s very professional and has a strong devotion to his work. He’s meticulous in his practices and he’s taken an extremely strict grasp of the team… He’s suitable for Team China for right now.”

Which leads us to this: who will replace him? Already, fans and media are openly rooting for Stephon Marbury, who has publicly stated his desire to coach the Chinese national team one day.

He has a little experience on the bench, too. After winning a CBA title with Beijing in 2012, Marbury was an assistant coach for the Beijing team at China’s 12th National Games in Liaoning Province.

Marbury is currently in the US, but Beijing TV’s reporter interviewed one of his Chinese friends, a journalist at Titan Sports, who reiterated that Marbury indeed wants to someday lead the national team. “But it definitely won’t be next year, and it won’t be the year after,” he said. “He wants to continue playing for Beijing Shougang (Ducks).”

Still, we are swiftly, it seems, approaching the day when Stephon Marbury is the head coach of the Chinese national team. Think about that for a second. The “Lone Wolf,” former Dream Teamer, after an ignominious exit from the NBA four years ago, may one day coach against the Dream Team. We can hardly wait.

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.”

“Aight.”

Beijing’s Stephon Marbury also makes a cameo. 2:20 mark. Don’t miss it.

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.

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, as he recorded just five points and seven assists in a 103-96 loss at Guangdong. Yi Jianlian, playing for the Southern Tigers, scored 15 points and grabbed nine boards.

To be fair to Arenas and the Shanghai Sharks — currently sitting in second-to-last place, while Guangdong is at the top — they were never supposed to win this game, and staying within single digits on the road is probably an accomplishment in itself. We have to ask again though: what’s up with Agent Zero? Like Tracy McGrady, another aging former NBA Dream Teamer in China, Arenas is proving to be a dud. Only McGrady’s Qingdao Double Star Eagles, in fact, is worse than Arenas’s Shanghai.

Meanwhile, Stephon Marbury’s Beijing Ducks are tied for first place with Guangdong. The two teams meet next week Tuesday in Dongguan, Guangdong province — the Chinese Basketball Association’s version of a Christmas Day headliner.