STEPHON MARBURY and the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) team that made him a legend abroad are headed for a temporary separation after the two sides failed to come to terms on his playing future and the former NBA All-Star turned down an offer to coach the team, according to multiple reports.

    Marbury would still like to play at least one more season in the CBA, but the Beijing Ducks — the team with which he won three championships in six seasons — is reportedly entering a rebuilding phase and unwilling to use one of its two foreign-born player spots on the 40-year-old, beloved as he is.

    The Ducks owned an option for next season that allowed the team to choose whether they wanted Marbury back as a player or coach, and he revealed in a letter to his fans on Weibo that he rejected offers to serve as an assistant or act as a player-coach at a lower salary.

    The No. 4 overall pick in the 1996 NBA draft, Marbury played 13 seasons and earned two All-Star bids, before flaming out as a backup point guard on the 2008-09 Boston Celtics. He signed in China later that year, and despite skepticism about a guy who lit up a joint and admitted on camera in August 2009, “I smoke marijuana,” being able to maintain a career overseas, Marbury proved everyone wrong.

    After two years on the Shanxi Zhongyu Brave Dragons and Foshan Dralions, Marbury joined the Beijing Ducks in 2011. He promptly led the Ducks to three CBA titles in four years (2012, 2014 and 2015), earning the nicknames “Lone Wolf” and “Old Ma” and becoming a celebrity of legendary proportions. The Chinese community embraced Marbury like no other American player in history, creating a postage stamp, a bronze statue, a museum, a musical (starring Marbury as himself) and a feature-length documentary on his life in his honor. He became such a phenomenon in Beijing that China made him the first foreign-born player ever to earn a “permanent residence card” from China.(SD-Agencies)