Basketball club quits league in protest over punishment

With a former championship club withdrawing from the league due to a controversial penalty, the Chinese Basketball Association has found itself in hot water as the dispute keeps taking its toll on the game's profile.

The Xinjiang Flying Tigers announced on Tuesday that they will quit the country's domestic basketball league in protest of a decision made by the CBA on Feb 17 to ban the club from signing any new players for a year.

The decision was made on the eve of the team's scheduled home game on Wednesday against the Beijing Ducks in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, when the CBA's 2022-23 regular season resumed following a long holiday break.

The punishment, as a result of an internal investigation, was imposed over an allegation that the Flying Tigers had been operating under a company not registered with the CBA, which violated league rules that each of the 20 CBA clubs has to run its financial operations, such as salary payment, player transfer, sponsorship and marketing, under a company registered with the association.

However, in a strongly worded statement released on Tuesday, the Flying Tigers denied all of the allegations, calling the penalty "absurd" and "groundless", while insisting that the club's registration status was "fair and legal" after having passed the CBA's preseason club scrutiny for the past three years.

"We tried to reach out to the CBA via e-mail, phone calls and even requested a visit for further explanation, and asked for a hearing, as a rightful procedure, before the punishment was made, but we received no response," the statement said.

CBA President Yao Ming paid tribute to the club's contribution to the sport's development in Xinjiang in a brief response to the decision, but did not reveal any further details.

"The Flying Tigers have made great contribution to Chinese basketball over the past 20 years. We respect its decision even though we felt quite regretful about it," Yao, a Basketball Hall of Famer, told cnr.cn after attending a media event in Beijing on Wednesday.

"Our focus now is to bring the league's competitions back to the fans," he said.

The CBA's investigation into the Xinjiang club's operations was triggered by the club's former star player Zhou Qi's heated contract dispute with the Flying Tigers.

Signed by the Flying Tigers from the league's youth training system in 2014, Zhou had developed into one of the league's most dominant centers and a national team starter. After helping the Flying Tigers win the franchise's first CBA title in 2017, Zhou joined the National Basketball Association's Houston Rockets, Yao's former club, which drafted Zhou in 2016 to start a two-year stint in the United States.

However, his desire to seek opportunities elsewhere at home after returning to the CBA in 2019 was denied by the Flying Tigers, which refused to release Zhou as a "free agent", citing league rules that a club is entitled to keep a player as long as it offers him a new contract that matches any new offers from other clubs.

After staying with the Flying Tigers for two more seasons, Zhou chose to ply his trade overseas by joining Australian league club South East Melbourne Phoenix in 2021 after his last contract with the Flying Tigers expired, hoping that they would agree to renegotiate his release after his overseas stint.

The 2.17-meter center, however, was left with no games to play when he returned from Australia in January after finishing his contract with Phoenix, only to realize that the Flying Tigers remained adamant about keeping him, citing the club's exclusive rights over his service under the same league rules.

During the past two years playing overseas, Zhou and his agent had discovered that his previous contract with the Flying Tigers was signed under the name of a different company, rather than the original entity registered with the CBA, and said that the club had potentially breached the league's rules, according to a statement released by Zhou on Wednesday morning.

"The CBA's punishment was sound and fair, given that the Flying Tigers had been intentionally operating under the radar of league supervision with the unregistered company taking over all business under the cover of the original one," Zhou said in the statement.

Should the Flying Tigers quit the league as announced, Zhou is expected to resume his unrestricted free-agent status as early as next season, after the deadline for signing up players for the remainder of the 2022-23 season has passed.