Post-season action in the Super Basketball League (SBL) is to begin this afternoon with the fourth-seeded Yulon Luxgens taking on the fifth-seeded Fubon Braves, followed by a showdown between the third-seeded Dacin Tigers and the sixth-seeded Bank of Taiwan at the Kaohsiung Fengshan Gymnasium.
With the higher seeds enjoying an automatic 1-0 lead to start the best-of-five series — whose winners will then face the top two seeds in the semi-finals next weekend — the lower seeds face tremendous pressure to win their respective games today.
“We are going to do our best to beat a very good Yulon team,” Fubon top scorer Earl Barron said in an interview earlier this week.
The league’s scoring and rebounding champ, who was also voted February and March’s Player of the Month, is confident that his team will give the Automakers a run for their money, even though the latter might have a slight edge on paper with a 3-2 record in their five regular-season games.
“The Barron” will need to step up on the defensive front this evening to contain a physical Yulon center in Liam McMorrow, who had two excellent outings against Fubon with a 22.5-point and 17-rebound average.
The mid-season addition to Yulon coach Wei Yung-tai’s crew has provided the once one-dimensional Yulon attack some much-needed inside presence with his tremendous size (2.15m and 125kg) and power.
In addition to a good effort from Barron, the Braves will also have to shadow the Luxgens’ Lu Cheng-ju, whose streaks of threes have proven capable of taking over a game.
The league’s premier perimeter threat should expect blanket-like coverage from the Braves, which could reduce the number of touches he might have on the ball and must find other ways to contribute to his team.
Following the match between the Luxgens and the Braves, the Tigers take on Bank of Taiwan in a must-win game for the Bankers.
“We are ready to take on whatever challenges we will face,” Bank of Taiwan skipper Hung Chun-cheng said.
His banking squad will need to play a nearly flawless game to counter a Dacin lineup who enjoy a commanding 4-1 advantage in their five contests during the regular season.
The Bankers defense will have their work cut out for them as they must shut down the Tigers perimeter game by coming out on the wings in their half-court defensive scheme to keep the Cats from running up the score.
One thing that coach Hung will have in this afternoon’s game is a healthy Chen Hsuan-hsiang, who missed a good part of the regular season due to injury.
Chen’s leadership and experience might just be what the Bankers need to pull off an upset win.
Other than keeping the score and the tempo of the game down, the Bankers will need a solid effort from big man Luke Nevill, who has the tough task of guarding Tigers’ center Bryan Davis.
With Davis desperately trying to come out of a late-season slump, Nevill must keep his cool against Davis’ aggressive style of play inside the paint.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier