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Roundup: Chinese Men's Basketball Team Still Lost
China's losses to Yugoslavia and Canada at the Diamond Ball 2000 men's basketball tournament in Hong Kong this weekend may have seemed normal considering the team shape of the team. But, it was impossible to see how good the Chinese men's basketball team really is based on their play at the tournament, which makes it very difficult to predict how well they will perform in the Olympics.
The teams entering the Diamond Ball 2000 tournament two weeks before the Olympics are all the top two teams on their home continents. Everybody has the same goal in the tournament: 1) warm up for the Olympics and 2) to test the team in battle. Each team did not play their best in the tournament, for example, in the second half, the Yugoslavian team played their subs instead of their starters and the Canadians did not play their best defense.
The Chinese team was not much better. Throughout the entire tournament, there wasn't much teamwork. Their inside game relied on the centers going one-on-one while the outside game consisted of passing around and finding an open three point shot. The Chinese team does not even have any basic two-player, three-player teamwork. The perimeter players don't pass the ball inside to the 210-centimeter inside players. The way they have been playing, they couldn't do worse if they had no coach.
Head coach Jiang Xingquan has always been able to push the Chinese national team to play its best and sometimes even playing better than its potential. In the late 1980s, he led the Liaoning team to the Beijing International Basketball Invitational and by 1994, he took the Chinese team to the elite eight in the Toronto World Cup tournament.
But, at other times, the Chinese national team has not played well under Jiang. For example, in the 1992 Barcelona Games, the Chinese team was going through a changing of the guard. Jiang let then-rookies Gong Xiaobin, Wu Qinglong and Dan Tao play in the Olympics and China did not win a single game, coming in dead last. However, two years later, one month before the World Cup in Toronto, the Chinese team changed the lineup and lost to Brazil and Spain by a huge margin before turning it around at the World Cup.
Hopefully, the Chinese team has held back a little in the tournaments leading up to the Olympics. However, the tournaments have also showed glaring weaknesses on the Chinese team such as being afraid of contact and pressure defense. When the Yugoslavian team stepped up their defense, the Chinese team fell behind by 20 points. Conversely, when the Canadian team relaxed on defense, the Chinese team began hitting their three pointers and inside shots and took a 10 point lead, but once the Canadian's stepped up their defense, China trailed by 10 points.
The Chinese team's performance in the three warm-up tournaments has given people reason to worry. But, hopefully, the Chinese team, which spent five months training for the Olympics, will do better in Sydney.
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