WCBA season comes to a close as Aussies crash the party
As the WCBA looks ahead to its postseason, Aussies are starting to find their form after multiple mid-season acquisitions.
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The Women's Chinese Basketball Association (WCBA) is knocking on the door of its unique postseason after a hyper-condensed regular season. There is the WCBA Club Cup which has two phases, with the first phase running from February 6-10, a break for Chinese New Year, and the second phase from March 2-8.
Due to the FIBA Women’s World Cup qualifiers, the league will also break for this, which is March 11-17. It then returns for its All-Star weekend from March 20-23 before the Playoffs begin on March 27, nearly two months after the regular season finishes. Incredibly, the break between the end of the regular season and the playoffs is only a few days less than the entire regular season.
This is a World Cup year, however, so this isn’t regularly scheduled programming, but it’s a great introduction as to how complex the scheduling in the WCBA can be.
The league is comprised of 18 teams, down from 21 in years past due to franchises not paying the competition fee. It’s segmented into two groups, aptly named Group A and Group B. Group A has 12 teams which all qualify for the WCBA Cup, while Group B has six teams, of which the top four make the Cup. This same pool of 16 teams makes up two separate Playoff windows. The 1-8 seed in Group A compete to be crowned WCBA champions while the bottom four seeds in Group A and top four seeds in Group B partake in a relegation and promotion system. Whoever wins the matchup in the second bracket either remains in Group A or is promoted. Threads user itstoshanichole has outlined these two paths.
Aussies have run rampant in the WCBA, with all of them joining the fray in the midst of the season. Liz Cambage made her return to Sichuan Yuanda for the third consecutive season with the club and her seventh in the league overall. She’s a stalwart of the league and won a championship with Sichuan in 2024 where she had a monster regular season, averaging 23.1 points and 11.3 rebounds while shooting 64.9% from the field, 35.7% from deep and 77.3% from the free throw line en route to a league MVP.
Her encore matched that with a Finals MVP and a 38 point, 10 rebound performance in a decisive game 5 after her team trailed the series 1-2 against Inner Mongolia.
This season, she joined Sichuan in early 2026 and has played five games for them. She, again, put up huge numbers, averaging 21.4 points, 7.4 rebounds and 2.2 stocks (steals plus blocks), shooting 56.9% from the field and the three point stroke steady at 35.7%. She played in four straight games before receiving a DNP-CD on January 17. She then played the next game on January 20 where she put up a near triple double with 18 points, nine rebounds and eight assists but has not been named on a box score since.
As for the rest of the Aussies, most of them are in their first campaign in China, aside from Alice Kunek. She’s hit the ground running in her return to the WCBA after a few months with Kayseri in Turkey that had the full spectrum of ups and downs. She spoke with The Pick and Roll on some of the hurdles she faced in Turkey.
