New Season

After comfortably defeating the Fukuoka Fortune Gods on the road, Tokyo Thunder finished the preseason with a flawless 9–1 record.

Especially after Wu Yufei officially joined the team, Tokyo Thunder went on an easy yet dominant six-game winning streak, fully demonstrating their goals for the season to every opponent in the league.

Naturally, Wu Yufei also won over most of the audience with his outstanding performances in those six games, drawing many Tokyo Thunder fans who had previously been waiting on the sidelines over to his side.

More than any of that, though, what pleased Wu Yufei most was that he had already begun to establish himself as a starter in Coach Oyama's mind.

Half a month later, in mid-April, the new season would officially begin.

Tokyo Thunder's schedule for the new season had also been released long ago.

The day after defeating the Fukuoka Fortune Gods, once everyone from Tokyo Thunder returned to Tokyo, Coach Oyama immediately gathered them again to study the new season's schedule.

In the new season, the entire Japan Professional Basketball League had twenty teams. Each team would play a total of fifty regular-season games over seven and a half months. Excluding various holidays, that meant roughly one game per week, with the occasional stretch of three games in two weeks. Overall, the schedule was fairly relaxed.

As for the format, the twenty teams were divided into Kanto and Kansai divisions, with ten teams each. Each division was then split into two groups of five, making four groups in total.

To reduce the exhaustion of traveling for road games, during the regular season, the five teams in the same group would each play a four-round robin, for sixteen games total. They would play teams from different groups within the same division in a three-round robin,