The much-anticipated 32nd William Jones Cup International Basketball Tournament will begin at the Taipei County Hsinchuang Gymnasium today, with the Taiwan College All-Stars taking on the Philippines at 3pm this afternoon.
The annual mid-summer basketball classic that began in Taipei 31 years ago will feature two local teams, the Taiwanese national team along with the College All-Stars, and five other foreign squads mostly from Asia — defending champs Iran, as well as Japan, Lebanon, the Philippines and Australia — in the seven-day competition.
Unable to make it in this year’s men’s competition are Kazakhstan, South Korea and Jordan, who declined the invitation to take part in the event because of short notice from the hosts and a lack of funding. However, Kazakhstan and South Korea will take part in the women’s competition.
Seeking to improve upon its fourth-place finish of a year ago will be a Taiwanese national squad led by skipper Chang Hsueh-lei of the Yulon Luxgens, whose crew of Super Basketball League (SBL) standouts include the Luxgens’ Lee Hsueh-lin and Lu Cheng-rue, Taiwan Beer’s Yang Jing-min and Chen Si-nian, the Dacin Tigers’ Lin Yi-hui and Chen Tzu-wei and Kinmen Liquor’s Cheng Ren-wei among a potent lineup that is 15 players deep.
Top names of the SBL such as Lin “the Beast” Chih-jeh, three-time MVP winner Tien Lei (Dacin Tigers) and the Luxgens’ Tseng Wen-ding will not be available for this year’s competition because of injuries.
As for the College All-Stars, Fu Ren Catholic University’s Liu Jung-yeh will lead a group of promising youngsters as they look to gain valuable experience in international competition to better their overall skills.
Iran and Lebanon are unquestionably the teams to beat in this year’s play, with the former ready to defend their title and the latter looking to give Iran a serious challenge following last year’s third-place finish.
Because of scheduling constraints, there will not be a medal round after the usual round-robin preliminaries, because the final standings will be based strictly on the result of the preliminaries, with a set of tie-breaking rules in case some teams finish with identical records.
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