Shanghai Boys Behaving Badly

We recently recapped an incident in a latenight incident in Shanghai involving nominal national team soccer player Mao Jianqing, who got involved in a late night early morning dustup at a Shanghai restaurant. Now its thug behavior entering the realm of Chinese basketball, as Chinese national team member (captain?) and Shanghai Shark, Liu Wei, got into a post game scuffle with a foreign player on Yunnan and has been handed the heaviest punishment in CBA history. Liu (currently averaging just over 14 points per game) will be suspended for 10 games and fined RMB50,000 and his teammate Cai Liang (who Liu Wei was attempting to "defend") will also receive the same punishment. No word yet on what, if anything, the Yunnan player, Gabe Muoneke, will receive. Muoneke is currently leading the CBA in scoring with 36.7 points per game and had just dropped 38 on Shanghai in a 107-97 home win. Perhaps its more results related frustration, as Liu's Sharks have yet to win a game this year.

Here's a (crappy) video of what happened and a news report showing a little more of what started the tension, Liu Wei wrote a blog entry about his "most unhappy game", which can be found here (in Chinese).

For more on the CBA, check out this post from another blogger who recently attended a game. In other player news, while it isn't the Glove, one of Payton's former Seattle teammates, Vin Baker, is currently in China trying out for Shanghai. There's also this interesting story about some CBA players ages changing from last year's media guide to this year's guide, some by as much as 3 or 4 years. But before you start yelling conspiracy, this story was originally broke by Chinese media and has received wide coverage in China, the main reason for the changes is due to an updated registration system that is far more accurate.

Hopefully this will be the last incident of this kind for the CBA, which could run the risk of becoming like the farce that is Chinese soccer. Though, US athletes sure aren't doing well either, recently, with guys shooting themselves in the leg and getting suspended before the game even begins (what's so wrong about "sloppy seconds"?). Enjoy the game!