Japan Basketball Association president Yasuhiko Fukatsu announced his resignation from the helm during a Tokyo news conference on Thursday with the sport's national governing body likely to face a ban from FIBA.

Fukatsu said that during a JBA board meeting on the same day he revealed his intention to step down and take full responsibility for not having been able to orchestrate a merger of the NBL and bj-league, the nation’s two top leagues, one of the major issues FIBA, the sports global governing body, has asked the JBA to resolve by the end of October. FIBA has said it will suspend the JBA if its requirements weren’t met.

"FIBA has pointed out our lack of governance, particularly seen in the unification of the NBL and bj-league to create one professional basketball league," Fukatsu said. "In order to achieve this, the three parties (JBA, NBL and bj-league) have agreed to form the league and made a draft. Yet we have not received final agreements (from all the clubs) at this point."

A JBA spokesman announced that Mitsuru Maruo, JBA vice president and NBL chief operating officer, would take over as acting president.

Although there is still a week until the FIBA deadline, Fukatsu said that the JBA was running out of time.

"It'll be difficult for us to come to a conclusion," Fukatsu, 69, said of the reason for his resignation before the deadline. "I took responsibility. And (the JBA and the new league committee) will be able to move forward with the new structure. I judged that they'd proceed better under a new person."

At a news conference earlier this month, members of the new pro league committee hinted that there were clubs, mainly the major corporate-owned NBL teams, that did not agree to the requirements for joining the new league, which would begin play in the 2016-17 season.

Japan’s national teams, including those in the under-age categories, have played in all the tournaments they were scheduled to compete in this year, but Olympic qualifiers for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games will be held next summer (dates and sites are yet to be known). If a suspension takes place, it will affect the development of the national teams, both men’s and women’s, as they wouldn’t be able to even schedule training camps overseas to play exhibitions.

This might be especially damaging for the women's team, which is in good position to reach the Olympics after grabbing its first Asian Championship title in 43 years last fall.

“The players would be affected in terms of their development, traveling abroad and so on,” said Fukatsu, who officially became the JBA president in June. “We would have to minimize the damage as much as possible, but if we are given a punishment, then we would not have the words with which to express our sorrow (to the players).”

Fukatsu insisted that the new league committee would still proceed on working to establish the circuit. It soon plans to officially start assembling clubs that would be willing to join.

Toshimitsu Kawachi, the bj-league commissioner, who is on both the JBA board and the new league committee, said the resignation of Fukatsu came totally out of the blue.

Kawachi was concerned about who the next president would be and how the JBA board would select him or her, because that person would obviously shoulder the heavy burden of navigating a potential FIBA ban and establishing the new league.

"We'd have to act as quickly as possible to lift the suspension," said Kawachi, a former Japan men's national team head coach.

The JBA will hold another board meeting next Wednesday, presumably discuss the selection process for the new president and what and how it would report to FIBA.