I have been a fan of NBA basketball since as long as I have memories of being alive. I was a Celtics fan because of my father, then became a Lakers fan because of Kareem and Magic Johnson, and have followed various teams over the years while not really having any sort of affiliation with any of them.
I have expressed many times in the past about how I feel the NBA season is too long and over the years as the game got faster, I felt as though it has lost a lot of its appeal because honestly, the game is a bit "too fast" IMO. I am sure that some super-fans out there would disagree with this but lately I have started to enjoy the WNBA more than NBA because of this.
So on a whim and because I had heard about some players getting big contracts in China, I decided to check out their version of the NBA called the CBA, which I presume stands for Chinese Basketball Association.
As you would expect, the CBA roster consists primarily of Chinese nationals as the players, but each team that I saw in the hour or so I spent watching it had some clearly NOT Chinese players on the team.
I noticed that the benches of most of the teams that I saw had a bunch of foreigners sitting there and I was wondering, arrogantly presuming they would be better than the Chinese players, why they don't just field all the foreigners at the same time.
As it turns out they have rules regarding how many non-Chinese players can be on the court at any given time.
According to what I could find online, each team is allowed to only have 1 foreign player on the court at a time, except for the teams that finished in the bottom 4 the previous year, they are allowed to play 2 foreign players but only for the first 3/4 of the game.
This is pretty funny to me but I would imagine that it is quite effective. There have been quite a few names that you might recognize from the NBA that have played in the CBA including Stephon Marbury, J.R. Reid, and Tracy McGrady. Many would say, and I think correctly, that these players were washed up by the time they went to the CBA but from what I have read, they did quite well in the CBA during their time there.
Stephon Marbury, for example. was a 3 time CBA champion, the MVP of the league twice, and a 3 time all-star. He is currently the head coach of one of the better teams, the Beijing Royal Fighters - which is a wildly stupid name for a team.
Now while I was watching the play seemed almost comical by how frequently the ball was getting turned over and how some of the people, especially the taller ones, didn't seem to have much ability to so much as dribble the ball - which is a relatively important part of the game. There were wild misses with air balls frequently, and rarely were there any dunks because I'm guessing that this either isn't possible given the average height of the players or perhaps it is frowned upon to showboat in the games.
It also seemed like it might be way too hot on the hardwood as well. Everyone was exceptionally sweaty, especially the foreigners, and people were slipping and falling down frequently. There were a ton of loose balls getting thrown out of bounds and often it was really difficult to even determine whose faults it was. I also watched for only an hour but the officials made many bad calls about possession during that time.
The level of ability is much much lower than other professional leagues around the world.
However, I will say this to their credit. I didn't notice anyone trash-talking, I saw very little showboating, gloating, or doing some ghetto trash like walking over your opponent after you dunked on him that is so common in NBA fights games. There seems to be a lot more respect and just because you CAN embarrass your opponent, doesn't mean you are going to do it. I find this wonderful actually because in the NBA it just seems like being a pompous jerk is one of the main priorities of the game in the NBA.
Will I watch this regularly? Absolutely zero chance. It was more humorous than it was competitive looking but it was kind of stark reminder as to why it is that China, despite having a much higher population that almost any other country in the world, cannot field a team at the Olympics that would stand any sort of chance in winning.
Almost all of the games are available for free on YouTube, so if you are an NBA fan, you too might find it funny to go and watch their "highlights" which to me just seem like regular plays or rather, kind of weak plays in the NBA.