BASKETBALL/No plan for 3rd pro league in Taiwan: Basketball association

Taipei, June 24 (CNA) Taiwan already has two professional basketball leagues, and one franchise owner has proposed a new one, but the Chinese Taipei Basketball Association (CTBA) said Monday that setting up a third pro league is a non-starter.

In a statement, the sport's governing body in Taiwan said that instead of setting up a league in addition to the current two -- the six-team P.LEAGUE+ (PLG) and five-team T1 LEAGUE (T1) -- it was focused on facilitating the integration of the two leagues.

Many members of the 11 clubs' management teams are also managing supervisors of the association, and the CTBA said it will soon talk to them about the two leagues' next step, which it hopes will be "aligned with public expectations."

"The CTBA is putting more emphasis on the process of the two leagues merging and will not significantly compromise the rights of any franchise or player due to the integration or merger," it said.

The statement was issued in response to an announcement by Walter Wang (王文祥), the owner of the PLG's New Taipei Kings, on Saturday.

Wang said he has collected letters of intent from nine of the two leagues' 11 franchises plus a team from Southeast Asia that expressed interest in forming a bigger league with at least 10 teams, though he denied they were out to form "a third new league."

Citing the history of the NBA, which merged with the American Basketball Association in 1976, Wang noted that the NBA benefited substantially from the union, and he said a similar step is a must for Taiwan's basketball market.

Many observers have questioned whether Taiwan's market can support two professional basketball leagues, much less a third, especially as interest in both leagues seemed to taper off this past season.

Wang indicated that the goal was to pool resources "to make Taiwan basketball stronger" and said he would keep working on persuading other teams to join.

He did not reveal which two franchises have yet to agree to the idea, but according to local media outlet Up Media, the two teams are the Taipei Fubon Braves and Taoyuan Pauian Pilots, two of the PLG's four original franchises when it opened in 2020.

The T1 was established in the summer of 2021.

The PLG and T1 are still scheduled to hold their drafts on July 10 and 11, respectively, and there have not been any changes to the schedule following Wang's press conference, indicating that if there are merger plans, they have yet to come to fruition.