It is a chant normally reserved for Chinese players, who are the only ones eligible for the Chinese Basketball Association’s (CBA) most valuable player award, but as Quincy Douby stepped to the free-throw line recently with his team’s Game 3 victory in the finals guaranteed, the partisan home crowd was glad to make an exception. As Douby swished his two foul shots, roars of “MVP” filled the arena.
Playing for the Xinjiang Guanghui Flying Tigers this season, Douby, as they would say back in his native Brooklyn, has been killing it.
Trailing, three games to two, to the Guangdong Hongyuan Southern Tigers in their best-of-seven series, Xinjiang need to win Game 6 and Game 7 this week to win their first championship in franchise history. After helping Xinjiang finish with their best regular-season record ever, Douby, 26, who was a standout at Rutgers and then spent three years in the NBA as a guard with the Sacramento Kings and the Toronto Raptors, has continued to build upon his status as the best Flying Tiger of all time. He is averaging 34.6 points a game in the finals, and he scored 53, a single-game record, in the Game 1 victory.
Photo: AFP
“I’m not focused on that,” Douby said when asked about the accolades. “I came out here to just focus on getting better.”
Xinjiang is a desolate and sparsely populated region in northwestern China with a harsh climate, vast deserts and a very restive Uighur population. It would seem an unlikely place for a championship basketball team. Yet, for the third year in a row, the Flying Tigers are in the finals.
Like the region’s capital, Urumqi, a city which has over the years absorbed Han Chinese hoping to cash in on the region’s oil and mineral reserves, the Flying Tigers, with a wealthy and ambitious owner, have transformed a mediocre club into a perennial contender by attracting Chinese players from other teams, as well as talented Americans.
Until now, the same three teams have had a stranglehold on the title since the CBA’s inception in 1996. Backed with money and resources, the Bayi Rockets (eight titles), Guangdong (six) and the Shanghai Sharks (one) were all able to acquire Chinese talent destined for the NBA and a talented supporting cast of national team players with which to surround them. Bayi built around Wang Zhizhi, Shanghai had Yao Ming, while Guangdong’s dynasty was sparked by Yi Jianlian.
In recent years, Guangdong have developed into an unstoppable force, winning six of the last seven titles, including the last three. This season, Guangdong have six current or former Team China players across multiple positions, all of whom play a lot of minutes.
Jason Dixon, an American who works as an assistant with Guangdong and previously played for 10 seasons with the team, says the team secret is in its Chinese roster.
“Our history of success comes down to our locals,” Dixon said. “On the weaker teams the Americans dominate, but when the good teams face each other, the Americans usually cancel each other out. Then you’re left with the local players, which for us is a huge advantage.”
In its relatively short history, the 17-team CBA has faced numerous challenges in its aim to become consistently profitable inside a country with an estimated 300 million to 400 million basketball fans. Referee corruption, on-court violence and the overall quality of play all remain problematic, but the league’s lack of competitive balance still lingers as a main reason it has not been able to take hold.
“There’s nothing interesting about the CBA,” said a Beijing restaurant owner and avid basketball fan named Zhai Jianming, who was echoing popular Chinese sentiment. “The same teams win every year and the referees are terrible.”
One of the leftovers of pre-reform Communist China, the cradle-to-the-grave sports system ensures that players stay on the same team for their entire playing career and sometimes beyond. Overcoming a team like Guangdong, which has the best domestic roster signed for what essentially amount to lifetime contracts, becomes extremely difficult. Still, Xinjiang now has a shot and the competitiveness of this year’s finals has increased fan interest.
To get as far as they have, Xinjiang, a team without one current national player, did the only thing they could — pay top dollar for the best available US players. Under league rules, each team is limited to two imported players and cannot play them on the floor together for more than two quarters of any game. So Xinjiang’s two signings had to be good ones, and they were, with Douby and James Singleton agreeing to contracts for more than US$1 million apiece.
Xinjiang were able to spend the money they did because owners, taking note of the interest that Stephon Marbury created last year in his Chinese debut, voted to lift the league’s salary cap on foreign players to attract more high-profile NBA veterans, but while Douby and Singleton have made the difference for Xinjiang, some other former NBA players, including Ricky Davis, Mike James, Steve Francis and Rafer Alston, were all out of the league within a month.
“A lot of guys aren’t built to play overseas, just like a lot of guys aren’t built to play in the NBA,” said Singleton, a four-year NBA player who turned down a one-year contract offer from the Washington Wizards to play in Xinjiang this season. “Not many guys can take being away from home, the cultural differences, the language barrier, the food, even the way the game is played.”
Douby and Singleton have adapted just fine. In conjunction with center Mengke Bateer, who hails from Mongolia and was part of the San Antonio Spurs team that won an NBA championship in 2002-2003, the intense and physical Singleton has helped create an overpowering front court that is tough for opponents to deal with and with the addition of Douby, the league’s most unstoppable offensive force, Xinjiang have several clear advantages over Guangdong, whose own two imports, Lester Hudson and Marcus Haislip, also have modest NBA backgrounds.
Douby, who along with Singleton has been living in Urumqi for more than seven months, says there is little to do there, but instead of being resentful, Douby has embraced his surroundings.
“The gym is right across the street,” Douby said of his living arrangement. “It just keeps me in the gym. I watch a lot of film. It keeps me focused.”
Despite his place in the record books, Douby is ineligible to win any other award other than the All-Star Game MVP, which he did in March by scoring 44 points — another single-game record for the league. Instead, Douby will have to settle for a more unofficial honor — best foreign player of all time, a title he was given by gaining 84 percent of fans’ votes in a recent online poll.
“I didn’t come here with a lot of personal goals, but for them to say that and for them to acknowledge the way I play, it means a lot to me. It makes me want to work harder,” Douby said.
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