Ended the first season of the Japanese B League, with 6 years of NBA resume & How did Yuta Watanabe perform, the highest salary

Last summer, Yuta Watanabe gave up the opportunity to continue playing in the NBA and announced that he would return to Japan to join the B League Chiba Jets. After almost a year, as the Chiba Jets lost to their opponents in the semi-finals and missed the final, Watanabe Yota's first season in the B League was completely over. How did Yuta Watanabe play in his first season in the B League after returning to China?

This season, Yuta Watanabe played 35 games for the Jets, averaging 27.7 minutes of playing time, scoring 13.3 points, 5.5 rebounds and 1.5 assists. Yuta Watanabe helped the Jets achieve a record of 42 wins and 18 losses in the regular season, ranking fifth in the B League.

In the playoffs, Yuta Watanabe played in 3 games, averaging 18 minutes per game, scoring 5 points and 5.3 rebounds.

Watanabe is a small figure in the NBA, but in the Japanese B League, he is a superstar. After returning to China last summer, he signed a two-year, 800 million yen contract with Chiba Jets, which is about two-year, 5.03 million US dollars. Watanabe's contract set a record for the salary of the Japanese B League, but his performance now seems not worthy of the highest salary in the league. It is OK in the regular season, but the playoffs are too down.

Watanabe ranked fourth in the team in the regular season averaged 13.3 points per game, third place was Yuki Toshiki (13.9 points per game), second place was Hog (16.2 per game), and the team's scoring champion was Christopher Smith (17 points per game).

Smith and Hogg, both of them are foreign players, and it is understandable that Watanabe cannot compare. However, Watanabe is not as good as Tomokashi Yukihiro, which is a bit unreasonable.

Watanabe has played in the NBA for 6 years, and now he can't average 20+ in the Japanese B League. I didn't expect that he didn't even have 15+, and he is not even the best player in the team. Perhaps, Watanabe is really overrated by fans. No wonder Watanabe's tactical status in the Japanese national team is not as good as that of Kawamura Yuki and Hachimura Shiraki.

As a comparison, Watanabe performed similarly with 35-year-old Zhou Peng. This season, Zhou Peng averaged 13.2 points, 3.1 rebounds and 2.2 assists per game with the Shenzhen team. Yang Yi’s remarks about Watanabe being worse than Zhou Peng’s are ridiculed by many fans. Looking back now, Watanabe is really inferior to Zhou Peng. Even though Watanabe has had 6 years of NBA history, he can't even score high scores in a low-level league. Doesn't this mean it?

However, Yuta Watanabe's wife is very satisfied with her husband's performance. After the Chiba Jets season ended, she posted several commemorative photos with her husband on social media, and wrote: "I did a good job in the 2024-2025 season."

Watanabe can't even get beautiful data even if she plays in the B League. Can she prove that she is worthy of the maximum salary next season?