Huskies guard Andrew Andrews and Cougars top scorer DaVonte Lacy will be among 13 Pac-12 players on a four-game, all-star tour of China starting Aug. 10. The trip is part of the conference’s Globalization Initiative to try to get the Pac-12 brand in front of the Chinese audience.
Utah coach Larry Krystkowiak’s team will face an all-star squad of collegians as well as teams from the Chinese Basketball Association, including the Shanghai Sharks owned by former NBA All-Star Yao Ming, and the Guangdong Southern Tigers, the 2013-14 CBA regular season champion. The Tigers’ leading Chinese scorer is Yi Jianlian, who played for the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks under Krystkowiak during the 2007-08 season before returning to the CBA in 2012.
The Pac-12 wanted to have all schools represented, but the academic calendars at Oregon and UCLA interfered with the trip.
Over the past two summers, the league sent to China an all-star women’s volleyball team, men’s basketball teams from Arizona State and UCLA and the women’s basketball team from California to China.
The 10-day tour will be the first men’s basketball tour for the Pac-12 since the conference sent men’s and women’s all-star teams to Japan in 1996. The league is also organizing an academic symposium with the tour that will include a university leaders’ forum and business meeting between conference and Chinese academic and governmental leaders.