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HPB: Basketball teams head for Hualien for Probation Cup

The seventh Hualien Probation Cup Basketball Tournament starts in Hualien this afternoon with the Taiwan Mobile Leopards taking on the Singapore Slingers at 2pm.

The annual basketball tournament, that draws hoop fans from all over the country to the “back garden” of Taiwan, features six of the seven squads from the SBL plus a college all-star crew.

Teams from four other countries complete the field for the five-day competition.

Representing Taiwan’s SBL are Taiwan Beer, the Yulon Dinos, the Dacin Tigers, the dmedia Numen and Pure Youth, with Hamamatsu Higashimikawa Phoenix of Japan’s Basketball Japan League (BJ), the Singapore Slingers, last year’s second-place finisher Kyung Hee University of South Korea and the Cebu Niños of the Philippines’ Liga Pilipinas completing the field.

The teams will be divided into three groups with the Dinos, the Leopards, the Numen and the Slingers in Group A, Taiwan Beer, the Tigers, Pure Youth, and the Niños in Group B, and a three-team Group C consisting of Kyung Hee University, Phoenix, and the Taiwan Collage All-Stars.

The preliminaries take place today through Friday before the top eight finishers advance into Saturday and Sunday’s final rounds.

Standing in the way of a repeat win by defending champions the Tigers are crowd favorites Taiwan Beer and Kyung Hee University while the Dinos will hope for better luck after a disappointing loss to the beer crew in the SBL Finals back in May.

Phoenix and the Slingers will also be looking to make an impact with the help of some hired guns.

Phoenix’s interior defense will be anchored by 236cm Chinese super center Sun Ming-ming while the Slingers will field 221cm 24-year-old Australian Sam Harris who signed with the Singapore side this season after a successful career at the Old Dominion University in the US.

In his senior season, he averaged 2.6 points, 2.1 rebounds and over one block.
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