The Shanxi Flame claimed the WCBA championship yesterday, winning on the Zhejiang Golden Bulls’ “home” court 97-87 to clinch the series 3-1. The game was played in Hangzhou, not Zhejiang’s usual home city of Yiwu, due to the fans’ assault on the refs following Zhejiang’s Game 1 loss. What really did the Golden Bulls in, however, was an injury to Liz Cambage, who took the court at less than 100 percent. (She still managed 29 points and 8 rebounds.)

Zhejiang only lost twice at home all season, both times to Shanxi in the finals.

Maya Moore, who is arguably the best female basketball player in the world, scored 34 points and pulled down 13 rebounds for the Flame. Because non-Asians aren’t allowed to win the finals MVP award, the honor went to South Korean Zheng Xianmin (19 points and 7 assists in Game 4). Former basketball director Li Yuanwei blasted the decision on Sina Weibo, calling the MVP restriction “outdated.”

For the series, Moore averaged 41.5 points and 10.3 rebounds. In Game 1, she scored 53. No one will forget that she was Shanxi’s best basketball player all year, and possibly the best China will see for a long time. (Unless she — and Cambage — come back next season. We can hope.)

Game 1: at Zhejiang 92, Shanxi 96
Game 2: at Shanxi 88, Zhejiang 99
Game 3: at Shanxi 112, Zhejiang 98
Game 4: at Zhejiang 87, Shanxi 97

What are the repercussions for a home crowd in which dozens of men jump from the stands to assault a referee? We suspected the punishment would be severe, and now we know exactly how severe. The WCBA has ruled that Zhejiang’s professional women’s basketball team, the Golden Bulls, will not be allowed to play in its home city of Yiwu for a full year.

We see the assault of the referees in the above video (we have another view embedded in the link above), but what we didn’t know was that the rabble surrounded the refs’ locker room and wouldn’t let them out for 40 minutes. Reports Shanghai Daily:

At the final whistle, a few irate fans rushed towards assistant referee Yang Xiaoguang and started pushing him, which soon turned into a melee with chief referee Cui Zhexiong also targeted. The referees managed to escape with the help of security guards and were stuck in the locker room for 40 minutes.

Zhejiang had suffered its first home loss of the season, 96-92, so we understand why fans were angry. But violence toward refs — or anyone, for that matter — is a terrible outlet.

And anyway, you win some, you lose some. Case in point: in last night’s game, Zhejiang won 99-88 — on the road — behind Liz Cambage’s 45 points and 17 rebounds. The best-of-five series is all evened up at one game apiece.

This means that there will definitely be a Game 4, scheduled to be played in Zhejiang. This also means that the Golden Bulls must find an alternate venue before Monday, subject to WCBA approval. Will the rowdies be willing to travel to see their favorite women’s basketball team? And how far? We’ll find out soon.

(Video on Sina for those in China without a VPN.)

Maya Moore scored 53 points and grabbed 13 rebounds in Game 1 of the WBCA finals yesterday. Whatever superlatives you want to append to that statement, feel free to do so, but I’ll just write this again: 53 points, 13 rebounds. This is where the focus should be: a remarkable individual effort from the world’s best female basketball player on Chinese professional basketball’s biggest stage. Imagine if LeBron James went for 53 in the NBA finals (or CBA finals, to complete the analogy). You’d want 800 words about that, right? Moore’s Shanxi beat Zhejiang 96-92 to grab a 1-0 lead in the best-of-five series.

This is not the main story, however.

After the game, Zhejiang fans — who just watched their team lose at home for the first time all season — spilled onto the court and intercepted the referees. One female ref managed to duck into the back before everyone else, but two male refs were surrounded and beaten. In the video, it doesn’t look like they took any serious blows, thankfully. Security was sparse, which seems like an awful oversight considering we see rowdy Chinese basketball fans do stuff like this much too often. Eventually, the refs are smuggled off the court, pursued by still-angry fans.

What do we say about this incident? An embarrassment? A shame? It’s lucky that no one jumped on the court and assaulted someone while the game was happening, but is it really a stretch to imagine this happening in the future? The hell of it is, the solution is simple: add more security. That’s it. Three guards can’t fend off a dozen rowdy spectators, but you know what? One dozen guards could!

For the purpose of the highest of high-profile matchups the league may ever get, it’ll be worth it. You already know Moore was doing her thing, but on the other side was Liz Cambage, i.e. the first female to ever dunk in an Olympics basketball game. She’s fairly unstoppable as well — her 35.3 points per game average this season was second only to Moore’s 38.1 ppg. And yesterday, she scored 38 points on efficient 11-for-16 shooting (16-for-17 FTs) before fouling out — perhaps it was this that incited the home crowd.

The WCBA has issued a public apology to the referees and promised to punish those responsible.

Meanwhile, the series shifts to Shanxi for games 2 and 3. By the way, the first time Moore (of the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx) played Cambage (of the Tulsa Shock) in China, they scored 53 and 49, respectively. You should watch tomorrow’s game — for the basketball, we mean.

UPDATE, 2/1, 10 am: Zhejiang is not allowed to play in its home city for one year.

Pictures via Sina:

Last Friday, before all-world basketball phenom Maya Moore’s first game in China, I wrote:

Let’s play a game: how many points will Maya Moore score in her WCBA debut tomorrow for Shanxi Xingrui Flame vs. Bayi? I’m going to set the over/under at 59.5.

She did not score 60 that game, topping out at 37. The next game, she only scored 34. But last night, against Yunnan, she decided it was time:

That’s 60 points plus 13 rebounds, 2 assists, 5 steals and 6 blocks, as her Shanxi Flame defeated Yunnan 93-88 in overtime. Here’s the box score. The next highest-scorer on Shanxi was Zhang Wei, with 10.

We’d make a comparison with JR Smith, who also scored 60 this past season in China, but Moore is on a somewhat different pedestal. Since joining the team, Shanxi has not lost. It’s funny because before Moore joined, Shanxi hadn’t won. The Flame are 3-2 on the young season, with Moore averaging 43.7 points, 15.3 rebounds, 4.3 steals and 2.7 blocks.

“This is simply the female version of [LeBron] James,” Zhang Xuewen, who plays on Shanxi’s CBA team, said after Moore’s debut last week. “Forget about it, we should all stop playing, might as well retire.” At the very least, opposing coaches should give her the Steph Curry-at-Davidson treatment and have two defenders shadow her at all times.

Meanwhile, Australian Liz Cambage continued her dominance as well, scoring 41 points to lead her team, Zhejiang, to another win. That team is now 4-1, losing only to defending champs Beijing this past Tuesday.

Zhejiang is scheduled to play Shanxi on December 8. If that game is not on national television here, the producers at CCTV should all just quit.

We were hoping for 60 points out of Maya Moore in her China basketball debut on Saturday. Instead, she merely filled up the stat sheet while leading her team, previously winless Shanxi, over previously unbeaten Bayi, 72-59. Moore, wearing Michael Jordan’s No. 23 (she’s the first woman signed with Jordan Brand), scored 37 points and collected 17 rebounds, 5 assists and 4 steals. The effort was enough to wow China’s (admittedly easy-to-impress) sports journalists: “Too fierce!” “Simply too awesome!” “She’s also so beautiful, God really isn’t fair!” were some of the things heard at the media table, according to Sina.

Meanwhile, another huge-name foreigner put up a monster game of her own. Australian Liz Cambage, who you might remember as the first woman to dunk in the Olympics this summer in London, went for 46 points and 10 rebounds to lead Zhejiang to victory. At 6-feet-8 (2.03 meters), it’s safe to say no team in the league — or many places in the world — has the personnel to match up against her.

Cambage created a bit of mini-controversy this summer when she decided not to rejoin her WNBA team, the Tulsa Shock, which drafted her No. 2 overall, after the Olympics. As she told ESPN’s Michelle Voepel in August:

“The Olympics was a lot more than I expected. I didn’t really expect to feel this low, and have no energy after it,” Cambage said by phone from Australia on Wednesday. “My friends warned me that a lot of people suffer from what they call the post-Olympic depression. You’re just training so hard for so long, and then it’s over. I’m just energy-less, and it’s been a struggle for me in the past couple of weeks.”

American fans, accustomed to a system in which players pledge full fealty to the club that pays them, were less than accepting of her reasoning. They’re probably even less happy to know that Cambage is currently in China.

“You know, I’m only 21. I’ve got all the time in the world to come play in the WNBA,” Cambage said. “It’s the best league in the world. But I’m just taking it day-by-day. Now I’m focusing on China, and I could head back to the WNBA after that.

“It just depends what direction everything goes. I really want to go back to studying, too, and I’m pretty sure I can do a lot of it online. So hopefully, it all works out.”

Just to make sure, I asked if that meant she won’t make a decision on the 2013 WNBA season until after playing in China.

“Yeah, definitely,” Cambage said. “Definitely.”

Voepel tells us it’s a decision about the bottom-line as much as anything. In Hangzhou, playing for Zhejiang, she’ll make about $400,00 this season. We’d think that was a typo — one too many zeros — if that same figure didn’t also appear in a picture caption. For perspective, only two years ago in the WNBA, the maximum salary — and you had to be a six-year veteran to qualify — was just over $100,000. Rookies make less than $47,000 — that was how much Maya Moore, undisputedly the best female player coming out of college, made in her rookie year, and that’s how much Cambage was signed for, too. Meanwhile, in China: $400,000.

“I love China; I’ve played there a few times on Australian team trips,” Cambage said. “And I know [Chicago's] Swin Cash has played in China, and she’s talked to me about it. I know [Minnesota's] Maya Moore is headed there as well. So it’s going to be a fun season. It will be a pretty big culture shock, but I’ve got to get ready for it.”

She’ll adjust just fine once the money starts flowing, we’re sure. And you can bet that if this country’s basketball league is willing to shell out six-digit contracts to the world’s best players, they’ll be getting a lot more talent coming its way, all the while helping domestic talent as well. (I called China’s women’s basketball team “my favorite of these Olympics” in the early-going, and it was for good reason. We hope they only get better.)

In the absence of video, here are more pictures from Saturday, via Sina:

UPDATE, 11/11, 10:31 am: Moore has just scored 60.

Let’s play a game: how many points will Maya Moore score in her WCBA debut tomorrow for Shanxi Xingrui Flame vs. Bayi? I’m going to set the over/under at 59.5 (take the poll after the jump). Shanxi has no other scorer (currently 0-2), and while Bayi is 2-0, we’re going to go out on a limb and say the team has absolutely no one who will be able to stop her. Remember, JR Smith scored 60 playing in a CBA game this past season, and he’s nowhere as good as Moore relative to the competition.

I don’t think Jon Pastuszek of NiuBBall is overstating it when he says Moore, fresh off leading the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx to a runner-up finish, “is going to shred this league into approximately one billion little pieces.”

Emphasis his, for good reason. Imagine if LeBron James played in the CBA. Think the comparison is a stretch? In the above video (on Youku after the jump for those in China), listen to her talk, with absolutely no false bravado, about her game over the summer vs. Team China (emphasis mine this time): “I thought I came in just trying to be aggressive and bringing energy. I love playing that way, it creates steals, it creates momentum and fast breaks, and I thought was able to get out a couple of times and make a good pass or receive a good pass and get to the free throw line, crash the boards a little bit, hit some open 3s – you know, all the things that I’m good at.” Just about the only thing she can’t do is dunk. Oh, wait a minute.

And check out this paragraph, via Pastuszek again:

A four-year UCONN standout, Moore completed what is arguably the most dominant run in modern day women’s hoops history, leading the Lady Huskies to a record 90 straight wins and two NCAA national championships from 2008-2011. Inside that period, she set the record for most points in UCONN history, notched four straight AP First Team All-American Team selections (only the second player to do that in NCAA history, men or women), won three National Player of the Year awards and set the all-time NCAA total wins mark with 150. If there’s something we missed, our apologies in advance, as the list could go on for just about forever times infinity.

How did this happen? In one word: money. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in June:

But the Flame offered Moore a nice contract. Moore said is was “significantly more than double her rookie contract,” which was just under $47,000 last year.

Moore also said:

China was a great opportunity, a new frontier. They are starting to develop more and more teams that will bring in some foreigners — we are foreigners now — over there. I think I can take advantage of a lot of things on the court and off the court.

We have no doubt Moore will take advantage of opportunities as it relates to sponsorships — she’s the first female signed with Jordan Brand — and personal adventure, but it bears repeating: she’s earning “significantly more than double” what she made two seasons ago in the foremost women’s basketball league in the world. We’re just happy to see that here, in China, she will finally be compensated according to her abilities.

In case you’ve forgotten, the defending WCBA champions are right here in Beijing. Their reign might be in jeopardy.

(Sixty may be a reach. If Bayi’s smart, it’ll put two defenders on Maya and play 3 vs. 4 against the rest of the Flame.)

UPDATE, 11/4, 10:23 pm: Moore “only” scored 37 points in a 72-59 win over previously unbeaten Bayi. She added 17 rebounds, 5 assists and 4 steals.

Via Sina, tinyurl.com/coj6mmy

They kept trying to jinx it, I swear to God they did. Before tonight’s game, the club gave away t-shirts (white, per Stephon Marbury’s suggestion) that read, “March 30, 2012: Beijing Ducks are champions.”

With 21.9 seconds left, Beijing up two and Guangdong set to inbound, the crowd chanted, “Championship! Championship!”

With 6.1 seconds — still 6.1 seconds left — after Beijing’s Chen Lei secured a rebound off an Aaron Brooks miss and got fouled, a BTV announcer shouted, “Beijing has won!”

Heck, forget all that. Before this series, Beijing’s seldom-used Chang Lin told a BTV reporter — with all the naiveté of a rookie just happy to get camera time — that he thought the Ducks would win the series 4 games to 1.

So here we were, 6 seconds remaining and Chen Lei, the 12-year veteran and captain of the team, stepping to the line with a chance to ice the game. It seemed fitting. Except — given how much the Ducks had goaded the basketball fates — it was much more fitting that Chen would miss his first free throw, leaving Guangdong the chance to deliver a dagger.

Brooks brought the ball over the mid-court line and passed to James Singleton, who lined up an awfully good shot at a game-tying three…

There’s no need for the suspenseful ellipses, of course. You already know Beijing won. The ball clanked off the back iron. Yet the ellipses are symbolic, because at every step of this series, one was never convinced — until the very end — that the Ducks were able to pull this out. And that’s what made this such a riveting series. Because as the overwhelming underdogs making its first finals appearance, playing a team in its 10th straight finals, each Beijing win seemed more incredible than the last.

Let’s recap. In Game 1, Beijing was coming off a tough series that went to the wire, while Guangdong — winners of the last four championships — had not lost a game in either of its first two series. Toward the end of the game, as Guangdong made a frenzied comeback attempt to cut a 23-point fourth-quarter deficit (with 10 minutes left) to five (with 5:30 left), and then to four with a minute to go, Beijing coach Min Lulei looked like he might hyperventilate.

If the Game 1 win was exhilarating, Game 2′s victory at Guangdong was an absolute shocker, in which the Souther Tigers’ sharpshooters kept missing late open looks to let Beijing escape 109-106. And then the Ducks get blown out in Game 3 and everyone’s wondering: has the heavyweight shaken off the rust, found its killer instinct? Game 4, like Game 1, felt like a must-win for the Ducks. They had to defend their home court.

Fast-forward to the fourth quarter of Game 5 tonight. Guangdong, down 1 after three quarters, suddenly catches fire. At one point, the Southern Tigers score on five consecutive trips down the court, with a Brooks three-pointer giving them a 109-101 lead with 7:49 left, forcing Beijing to call timeout. The Ducks’ bench looks deflated. Guangdong maintains its eight-point deficit for another minute, go up 113-105.

And that’s when Beijing begins to claw back. The lead gets cut to 113-109 with just under six minutes to go, and coming out of a timeout, Marbury signals for the crowd to make more noise. The 18,000 in attendance respond. A minute later, Randolph Morris gets an emphatic rejection, and the Ducks’ spark plug of a guard, the diminutive Lee Hsueh-lin, nails a three on the other end to tie the game at 114. Wukesong erupts. Marbury assists on a layup the next time down to give Beijing a two-point lead and suddenly the championship is right there. It’s 116-114 with a little more than four minutes to play.

The champs get off the mat, though, and eventually the game is tied in the last 90 seconds, ball in Brooks’ hands. He puts an expert move on Marbury, their arms get tangled, and the ref whistles Marbury for his sixth foul. Those in the crowd not too stunned to see their hero trudge toward the bench would chant MVP, but troubling reality was that Beijing would be without its best player for the last minute-21 of a game knotted at 121.

Had Marbury already done enough, with 41 points, 7 assists, 3 rebounds and 2 steals? His teammates put on their defensive stand of the season, ending in a block at the rim. After Guangdong’s 12-year veteran Zhu Fangyu is whistled for a blocking foul, Randolph Morris sinks two free throws — catching a lot of rim both times — to put the Ducks up two with 21.9 seconds.

Two Guangdong timeouts and two missed three-pointers later, Beijing has its first men’s basketball championship in the club’s 29-year history.

~

Cameras followed the players and coaches into the locker room, where at least three people wept with the bright nimbus of camera lights in their eyes. It was chaotic and exuberant, and wholly good, enough to make one forget all the controversy that preceded this moment.

They retook the court. The trophy came out, which looked like it was made out of jade, while Queen’s “We Are the Champions” played. They took a team picture, the duck mascot scampering down to the front row. Eventually the trophy ended up in Marbury’s hands and his alone. He kissed it while the last of the confetti fluttered to the floor.

When the madness died down, the fans beginning to take their leave, a BTV reporter found Chen Lei and asked him about his 12-year career and all the tribulation he had endured.

“It was all worth it,” he said.

~

Beijing is currently the capital of Chinese professional basketball: the WCBA champion resides here as well.

I’m going to be frank with you here: I don’t know that Beijing’s 89-84 win over Zhejiang — clinching the series 3 games to 0 — was “trending” news, as the kids say. But that shouldn’t excuse my negligence. Beijing won its first WCBA title in its 31-year history (for comparison, the WNBA has only been around 14 years), led by its star center, Nicky Anosike, who you might remember as a star at Tennessee. In the above video, you’ll see the first thing Beijing’s head coach does after the buzzer is deliver a bouquet to his wife in the stands, then go to his 12-year-old son, who’s in tears. That’s a nice scene. Highlights of the game after the jump.

By the way, Zhejiang was the 8 seed, and Beijing was the 2. Unlike on the men’s side, I guess there is some parity in the WCBA.

Congrats to everyone involved. Beijing = CHAMPIONS. Yeah, civic pride!

The next night, inspired by their counterparts (so says Sina), the Beijing men’s team — also a 2 seed — beat Zhejiang Guangsha on the road to take a 1-0 lead in the first round of its best-in-5 series.