Xin Hua

Xin Hua sit sixth in this season's National Basketball League Division 1 table, six wins against five losses, the kind of mid-table record that leaves a team with games still to save and little separating them from the pack above.

The name carries weight the current form does not always match. Nine years ago the section still competes to reach: 2017, when Xin Hua beat Salfa Basketball Club 76–61 in the final to take the Division 1 title, Mitchell Folkoff closing it out with 13 points and 12 rebounds. A year later they carried that form to Thailand, having won the Kluang Basketball Invitation and earned Singapore's spot at the FIBA Asia Champions Cup SEABA qualifiers. In 2019 they reached the final again and lost it, beaten by Siglap Basketball Club. The league itself then went quiet through the pandemic, and when it resumed, the title passed to others — Eng Tat Hornets among them — leaving Xin Hua chasing a championship it has not touched since.

They train and play out of the Singapore Basketball Centre, two indoor courts rather than an arena built for crowds, which suits a club whose basketball side has never needed its own headline. The red that shows up in team colours and in the "Sea of Fire" section behind the bench traces back to the football club sharing the name.

That football club is the older story by a century. The Straits Chinese Football Association became Xin Hua in 1911, and basketball was the late addition — a division opened in 2016, decades after the parent club had already made its name on other pitches, so that the team now known as Novu Blaze started not as a founding idea but as one more sport a long-running club decided it could carry.