Growing success from the grassroots

China's 'big-ball' teams need to rely on homegrown talent to compete on the world stage, as Sun Xiaochen reports from Incheon, South Korea.

When the Chinese media approached starting center Wang Zhelin to talk about the national basketball team's poor performance at the Asian Games, the towering 20-year-old bowed his head to avoid the TV cameras.

"We feel bad and we want to say sorry to all the hoop fans in China who were disappointed by our performance here. We did our best on court, but the gap (with the best Asian teams) is still there," the 2.14-meter Wang said tearfully in the wake of a hard-fought quarterfinal defeat to Iran, which left him with badly bruised ribs and a bloodied nose.