Whats a Chinese franchise doing in a second-rate American hoops league?
Some 150 people have turned out on this Tuesday night to witness the most daring experiment in Chinese basketball history. If the crowd isn’t larger, it’s only because daring is a relative term: Chinese hoops hasn’t exactly been a wellspring of innovation. Or maybe it’s because the laboratory for this experiment is a community center gym in the Latino-rich LA suburb of Maywood. This is where the Aoshen Olympians will host the Los Angeles Aftershock in a midseason American Basketball Association game. The experiment’s guinea pigs are members of a Chinese Basketball Association franchise that was airlifted lock, stock and ball rack out of Beijing so it could be trounced in the Las Vegas Summer League’s Global Hoops Summit. But these days they are enjoying a little payback in the fledgling ABA. For anyone even vaguely familiar with the difficulty Wang Zhizhi and Yao Ming faced when they tried to leave China, the thought of an entire team skipping the country is unimaginable. But the Olymp
