ABSTRACT
Bayi Fubang Rockets is a professional basketball club in the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) League. Due to its close relation with People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Bayi Fubang Rockets used to possess resources that warranted itself an unrivaled competitive advantage. In recent years, its ties with PLA also transformed those resources and led the club to an unprecedented downward journey from a strong championship contender to a team that is even below mediocre. Yet, with all the drastic changes, no existing research has addressed its decline and the fact that Bayi Fubang Rockets still somehow maintained a persistent popularity among Chinese basketball fans. This study, with a comprehensive review of literature on the theory of resource-based view (RBV), first summarizes the pivotal attributes of organizational resources and capacities that enabled a competitive advantage. Then it moves on and continues the investigation into Bayi Fubang Rockets through the lens of RBV, and evaluates the key attributes of club resources and capacities of Bayi Fubang Rockets, with an aim to comprehend the causes and effects of its ups and downs over a two-decade span. It is suggested that valuableness, rareness, imperfect imitability, and non-substitutability were of the essence in the developmental process of Bayi Fubang Rockets and were the key determinants of the club both financially and in terms of league performance. The chapter concludes by providing a conceptual extension of the utility of RBV in sport management literature and offering a route for more practical qualitative research on endemic PSCs.
