Bay Area Dragons players threaten legal action over axing, claiming EASL was ‘intentionally misleading’
- Several players wrote a long post on Weibo claiming EASL had misled them in days before team was disbanded
- League says players have made false accusations on the internet and reserves right to take own legal action
Several members of the disbanded Bay Area Dragons have blasted team officials on social media, saying they were axed without warning and left with no chance of finding another team this season.
The lengthy post on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, signed by Liu Chuanxing, Zhu Songwei, Ju Mingxin, Zheng Qilong, Adili Kuerban, Wang Yunzhang, also accused the East Asia Super League, which ran the franchise team, of “intentionally misleading” the players over its status.
Saying they were “shocked and felt helpless” after being told during an online meeting the team was being axed, the players said until that point they had been working on training plans over the summer while preparing for a preseason tournament in Xiamen.
The group said the league’s actions had resulted in the “infringement of the legitimate rights and interests of all players” and they planned on taking legal action.
In response, the league initially said that as there were legal issues involved it would “reserve comment until a later date”, however sources acknowledged the timing of the move to disband the Dragons had been unfortunate, given it came one day after the Chinese Basketball Association’s deadline for teams to sign new players expired.
The league also threatened legal action of its own on Friday, putting out a lengthy statement in Chinese on Weibo defending its decision to scrap the Dragons, which it previously said was taken with the interests of the EASL as a whole in mind.
