Reality bites for humbled hoopsters

Paris Olympics slip further from sight for Team China as do-or-die game awaits

Team China's second straight loss at the FIBA World Cup dealt its Olympic qualifying chances a hammer blow, while sparking heated debate about the sport's stagnant talent development at home.

Built around a national system that values Olympic success as a top priority, the Chinese men's basketball program is facing a do-or-die moment at FIBA's marquee tournament, where its winless run so far in Manila has almost shut the door to the Olympics for a second straight time, four years after the disappointing 2019 World Cup campaign on China's home court.

Outgunned and outmuscled, Team China lost to unheralded tournament debutant South Sudan, 89-69, in its second Group B game on Monday, further lengthening the odds on securing a Paris 2024 berth as the highest-ranked Asian team in the Filipino capital.

With co-host Japan stunning Group E rival Finland on Sunday to register the only win by an Asian team by Monday night, China will need to win at least one more game than Japan does in the final three rounds, including two cross-group classification games in the second phase, and do it by large enough margins, to outrank the Japanese.

After losing the first two group games — just like Asian rivals the Philippines, Jordan, Iran and Lebanon — China fell to last but one in the continental race to Paris on Monday with its minus-62 points difference only bettering Lebanon's tally.

Approaching Wednesday's final Group B game against experienced international contender Puerto Rico, Team China simply has to go for broke.

Head coach Aleksandar Djordjevic said making the right mental adjustment will be key.

"The people who know it best are us," Djordjevic said of the huge task awaiting China. "It's one of the goals (to earn Olympic qualification) and we have our back against the wall now.

"If we understand it in the right way, it can be a great motivation. It just doesn't have to be a pressure or an extra burden on us.

"We just have to go out there and play our best game against Puerto Rico. I don't know any other way," said the former Serbia national team guard and coach.

Puerto Rico, led by former NBA guard Tremont Waters, has averaged 12.5 3-pointers per game, shooting 37.9 percent beyond the arc to rank ninth among all 32 teams at the World Cup.

Relatively small in stature, the 1.8-meter-tall Waters proved he has a big heart by scoring 19 points to go with 10 assists, four rebounds and three steals to drive Puerto Rico past South Sudan in a 101-96 overtime victory on Saturday.

"China is a team with a great coach and a lot of experience," Puerto Rico's head coach, Nelson Colon, said after losing to Serbia 94-77 on Monday.

"It's going to be an important game that means a lot for both teams. We have to prepare well, be disciplined in things that we didn't do well. I have confidence in my players."

Kyle's not enough

After going scoreless in the 105-63 opening loss to Serbia on Saturday, Team China's American-born forward Kyle Anderson came up huge on Monday to score a game-high 22 points.

The Minnesota Timberwolves' playmaking forward took off his goggles midway through the first quarter and unleashed a scoring spree that even the NBA has rarely seen. Anderson went all out to score half of his 16 attempts, mostly contested shots near the rim, to go with a team-high five rebounds and three assists.

It was far from enough, though, to turn things around with so little help offered from the rest of his teammates.

Young guard Zhao Rui was the only backcourt player to register double-digits in points (13), while center Zhou Qi added a thin contribution of 10 points and three rebounds in the paint, where China's strength was neutralized by the tall, elastic and aggressive South Sudanese post players.

"I wish we would've come out with a win more importantly than me scoring 22 points," said Anderson, who acquired Chinese citizenship last month through his mother's family heritage in Guangdong province.

"The physicality, spacing and calls you get in the NBA, you don't get here in FIBA. It's just a different game," said the 29-year-old New York native who goes by the Chinese name Li Kaier on the international stage.

"We just got to figure out how to play hard and well for 40 minutes. Twenty minutes here at this level isn't going to cut it. We just got to watch the film, make some adjustments and look within ourselves trying to play hard for 40 minutes, including myself."

Reform calls

China's poor showing in Manila has revived memories of the 2013 squad's humiliating fifth-place finish at the Asian Championship in the same city a decade ago.

That flop was blamed on the sport's stagnant talent development, the result of a lack of competition in the domestic league and insufficient investment in youth training. Ten years later it seems those issues are still afflicting the national program.

The continuous decline on the men's side since the golden generation, led by hoops legend Yao Ming, retired in the early 2010s has sparked anger among fans, with many bemused at how Chinese men's basketball has sunk to the underachieving levels of their counterparts in the men's national soccer team.

"I didn't see any fight in them, or a consistent desire to win the game," former national team forward Jiao Jian said during a program on Migu.com after the defeat to South Sudan.

"The pride of representing the country and the spirit of fighting until the end are missing from this group as far as I can see," added Jiao, a member of China's 2003 Asian champion team.

The domestic league's growing appeal to broadcasters and sponsors has masked a shrinking talent pool at the grassroots level, where youth training focuses too much on instant success, said legend Gong Xiaobin.

"The youth training system nowadays calls for results too early and too often for grassroots coaches to draft and develop talents in the right way," said Gong, a formidable member of China's eighth-placed team at the 1994 world championships and 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

"Our system has failed to identify and nurture true talents, as opposed to players who are simply tall, from a very young age and develop them with patience for them to flourish on the elite stage.

"The foundation of the talent system needs reform."

The contentious limit on foreigners in the CBA — imposed in a bid to guarantee more opportunities for homegrown players, needs a rethink, with observers urging the league to level up its competitiveness.

"You always have the same amount of job positions and you always have the same amount of players. So they know they are always gonna have a job," former Argentina star Luis Scola said in an interview last year.

"There is a very limited number of foreign players (in the CBA) and that creates a lot of jobs so they (local players) always have their positions. Nobody is pushing you ...and that slows you down," added the former NBA forward who played in the CBA from 2017-19.