(Yicai Global) June 5 -- China’s top-flight basketball league, the Chinese Basketball Association, plans to resume its season on June 20 after a four-month hiatus caused by Covid-19.

Teams will play the remaining games without an audience and at central venues, the not-for-profit CBA said yesterday. Games will take place either in Qingdao, in the north, or Dongguan, in the south, in a bid to help prevent further spread of the coronavirus.

The league is the first of China’s major sports competitions to resume competition since the virus shut down events across the country, though the CBA is yet to fix a schedule for the remaining regular season or playoff games.

Several overseas professionals playing in the league have been unable to return to China because of Covid-19’s ongoing global spread, so the organizer is adjusting rules to level the playing field for teams without their foreign talent.

The league already planned to reduce the number of overseas players a CBA team can have on the court at any given time to one starting next season. The limit was previously two.

The CBA had planned to have all 46 rounds of regular season fixtures completed by March this year, with the playoffs and finals scheduled to begin in June. Covid-19 erupted after 30 rounds of regular season games at the end of January.

Editor: James Boynton