Chapter Ninety-Four: The First Day of the Competition

Yu Manman shot Geng Haoshi a glare. "I’ll give you the bonus later. Now get back to training!"

"I only won by three points, and you still get on my case," Geng Haoshi muttered under his breath, but he had no choice but to return to training first.

The training every night was still the same as before: rapid passing, rapid arm swings, rapid punching, the fifty-meter sprint, shooting drills, and dribbling back and forth across the court. The only difference was that, during training, each player had to strap a total of eight lead weights to their limbs.

After the evening session ended, Geng Haoshi received the 20,000-yuan assessment bonus from Yu Manman. In his excitement, he unexpectedly finished off the remaining seven jumps from the final task of the intermediate stage in one breath.

Even 9527 could not help sighing. "No wonder they say money can make the devil turn the millstone."

With that, Geng Haoshi had completed every task in the intermediate stage of the Super Slam Dunk System and successfully unlocked the advanced stage.

The very first task of the advanced stage was to reach a dribbling sprint speed of five meters per second over a distance of twenty-eight meters within two months.

This was somewhat similar to the intermediate-stage task of reaching eight meters per second over twenty-eight meters within one month. That earlier task was meant to train the ability to retreat quickly on defense. This advanced-stage task, by contrast, was meant to train fast-break offense.

A distance of twenty-eight meters is the full length of a basketball court. To cover that distance while dribbling at five meters per second meant running the entire length of the court in 5.6 seconds. That was truly astonishing.

As a side note, in NBA history, the fastest man was once Allen Iverson, whose full-court dribble speed was 5.71 seconds. Iverson, forever the wind-borne prince in the hearts of fans, made his drives and crossovers into legends among legends. With his windlike speed, he conquered every opponent on the court and set a benchmark for the league as well. Ever since Iverson, whenever a player known for speed emerged, he would inevitably be compared with Iverson. Marty Black, a famous NBA scout, once said that in his forty-five years in the league, Iverson was the fastest player he had ever seen.

Another side note: later, an NBA player named Harris managed to dribble from one baseline to the other in just 3.9 seconds. With that result, Harris successfully applied for and received official confirmation from the Guinness World Records, becoming the fastest person in the world at dribbling across a basketball court while running.

...

At 3:00 p.m. on April 15, 2017, the members of the Tiancheng Polytechnic University men's basketball team entered rooms marked with Xs and began the final assessment on their notebook list: shooting accuracy of 45 percent.

The specific requirement of the assessment was this: in one-on-one play, they had to face off against an AI sports robot developed by the Feizhi Group for 1,000 games, and only by achieving a shooting accuracy of 45 percent or higher would they pass.

After nearly two hours of assessment, the players finally all reached shooting accuracy above 45 percent without any serious mishaps. Of course, this was under the condition that the robots they faced were set to the "ordinary" level of athletic mode.

Thus, the players successfully completed every assessment related to one-on-one shooting accuracy.

As early as the beginning of March 2017, the Feizhi Group had already developed robots capable of fully simulating the movement patterns of human basketball players. In other words, this batch of AI sports robots not only knew how to defend, but could also attack like human basketball players.

With two months left before the 2017 National College Basketball League, Yu Manman had the team begin frequent matches against the robot squad—an average of two games a day.

At first, Yu Manman set every robot on the opposing team to "ordinary" mode.

Although the average height of the robot team was over 185 centimeters, after only three games, the Tiancheng Polytechnic University players had already figured out how to compete against such a tall lineup.

In the days that followed, they played better and better. Not only could they defeat the robots every time, but their winning margins grew larger and larger as well.

To give the players more complete game training, starting on April 26, 2017, Yu Manman set two of the robots on the opposing team to "professional" mode.

Robots in "professional" mode possessed the movement patterns of professional basketball players.

In China, it was rare for an ordinary university team to have players of professional standard. Only a few universities ever had one or two such players.

Once two robots of professional caliber appeared on the opposing side, the Tiancheng Polytechnic University team began to find their matches difficult. The result was more losses than wins.

Afterward, through Yu Manman's adjustments to the lineup and repeated refinement of the players' coordination and chemistry, they gradually reached a point where their games against the robot team ended in roughly equal wins and losses.

...

At 7:50 a.m. on June 16, 2017, the members of Tiancheng Polytechnic University were fully prepared aboard a luxury bus parked outside Chenzhi Sports Hall.

Today was the opening day of the 2017 National College Basketball League. Eliminatory rounds were about to begin in the eastern, western, southern, and northern divisions of the country. Through the eliminations, the top twenty-five universities from each division would advance, for a total of one hundred schools entering the preliminaries.

There were 2,836 universities nationwide, and barring accidents, every single one would send its own university basketball team to compete.

Tiancheng Polytechnic University, where Geng Haoshi studied, was located in the eastern division of Huaxia Country. The east was the most densely packed of the four divisions, with a total of 946 universities. That one division alone accounted for a full third of all universities in the country.

For that reason, the eastern division’s elimination rounds would take several more days than those of the other three divisions.

And yet, although the east had the greatest number of universities in Huaxia Country, its best finish in the National College Basketball League over the years had never cracked the top ten. Last year, for instance, the best result in the east belonged to Wanlong Transportation University, which still finished only twenty-third.

As a side note, Wanlong Transportation University had played a friendly against Tiancheng Polytechnic University on February 16, 2017. Believing that a match against a team that usually languished at the bottom of the standings would surely be a guaranteed win, Wanlong Transportation University sent only its reserves. The result was that their swagger failed them, and they lost to Tiancheng Polytechnic University.

At exactly eight o’clock, the entire Tiancheng Polytechnic University basketball team boarded the luxury bus sponsored by the Feizhi Group and headed for the site of their first game.