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Yao unveils novel plan for national team
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THE Chinese Basketball Association’s new president, Yao Ming, is set to revolutionize the men’s national team — there will be two national teams led by two separate groups of coaches and which will represent China in international competitions by turn over the next two years.
In 2019, the two teams will be combined into one to take part in the 2019 FIBA Basketball World Cup and the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.
The CBA is organizing a new men’s national squad. The newly unveiled selection plan has a few highlights:
— Two separate coaching teams will be selected and named by the CBA between April 18 and 23.
— There will be no exchange of players between the two national teams in 2017 and 2018 before they are combined into one team in 2019.
— Both teams will have Chinese head coaches assisted by foreign coaches.
The idea behind organizing two national teams is to create a new competitive model, while providing a bigger platform for good players and coaches. The two teams will be treated equally, the CBA insists.
During the selection of head coaches, priority will be given to retired national team players, or those who have coaching experience and achieved good results with CBA teams or city- and province-level teams.
Being the host country, China already has a slot at the 2019 FIBA World Cup. Therefore, the World Cup qualifiers, which start at the end of this year, will become good practice opportunities for the new national teams. The 2017 Asian Cup and the 2018 Asian Games will also test the quality of the teams.
The new format, deemed an experiment by Yao, a former NBA star, will recruit more players into the national squad for evaluation over the next two years. Yao hopes that more competition will bring the best out of the players, as well as the coaches.
The new format, however, has drawn skepticism from some domestic media, amid concern that since the two teams would apply different playing styles and strategies, it would make their union difficult. Some even doubted whether the two teams would be treated equally as promised.
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