Taiwan already has two professional basketball leagues, and one franchise owner has proposed a third, but the national basketball association (CTBA) yesterday said that setting up a new pro league would be a non-starter.
The sport’s governing body said in a statement that instead of setting up a third league in addition to the six-team P.League+ and five-team T1 League, it was focused on facilitating the integration of the two leagues.
Many among the 11 teams’ management staff are also managing supervisors at the CTBA, and the association said it would soon talk to them about the future of the two leagues, which it hopes would be “aligned with public expectations.”
Photo: CNA
“The CTBA is putting more emphasis on the process of the two leagues merging, and would not significantly compromise the rights of any franchise or player during an integration or merger,” the association said.
The CTBA statement was issued in response to an announcement by Walter Wang (王文祥), the founder and chairman of the P.League+’s New Taipei Kings, on Saturday.
Wang said he has collected letters of intent from nine of the two leagues’ 11 teams, as well as a team from Southeast Asia, expressing an interest in forming a bigger league with at least 10 teams.
However, they were not out to form “a third new league,” he said.
Referring to the NBA, which merged with the American Basketball Association in 1976, Wang said that the NBA benefited substantially from the union, and a similar move is a must for Taiwan’s basketball market.
Many observers have asked whether Taiwan can support two professional basketball leagues, much less a third, especially as interest in P.League+ and T1 League seemed to taper off this past season.
The goal was to pool resources “to make Taiwan basketball stronger,” and he would keep working on persuading other teams to join, Wang said.
He did not reveal which two franchises had yet to agree to the idea, but Up Media reported that they are the Taipei Fubon Braves and Taoyuan Pauian Pilots, two of the P.League+’s four original franchises when it launched in 2020.
The T1 League was established in the summer of 2021.
The P.League+ and T1 League are still scheduled to hold their drafts on July 10 and 11 respectively, and there were no changes to the schedule after Wang’s announcement.
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