At 2.26 m and 134 kg, yao ming could have scored his 32.4 points per game last season in the Chinese Basketball Association the easy way, dropping them into the bucket like an apple picker on a ladder. So why did he often hoist jumpers from 18 feet instead? "First of all, I'm not buff enough," he said through an interpreter at the world championships in Indianapolis over the summer. "I got pushed away from the basket. And even when I didn't, I couldn't get anyone to throw me a pass."
Which raises another question (besides "What is Mandarin for buff?"): Shouldn't your Shanghai Sharks teammates have simply lobbed you the ball? Yao smiled. "You know that," he answered in his basso profundo. "But somebody doesn't know."
Frustrated by coaches and teammates who didn't have the first idea about how to exploit his size, skill and agility, the 22-year-old Yao is eager to join the Houston Rockets, and the NBA is even more eager to have him. The ranks of the league's big men are undergoing sweeping changes. Most of the centers who spent the past decade ruling the paint—Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning—have retired or are on their way out, taking with them the sort of strength and guile that have long defined the position. Their towering, glowering dominance as heirs to George Mikan and Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain and
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Moses Malone is embodied by only one man among the 29 teams of today. "LCL" is what 2.28-m, 156-kg Shaquille O'Neal has taken to calling himself—as in Last Center Left.
It's not that seven-footers have stopped arriving in the NBA; it's just that they seldom act like traditional pivots when they do. Kevin Garnett of the Minnesota Timberwolves (by way of Farragut Academy in Chicago), Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks (by way of the WUrzburg X-Rays) and Pau Gasol of the Memphis Grizzlies (by way of FC Barcelona), for instance, have made unconventional entrances and indelible impressions. Fans who can't imagine walking a mile in Shaq's size 22s see in this new wave something closer to an Everyman Big Man, who creates his own shots off the dribble, fires three-pointers in transition and feels less comfortable with his back to the basket than facing it.
Now comes Yao, the No. 1 pick in the June draft, on whom the old expectations fit as well as off-the-rack clothing. He takes more pride in his fluid stroke from the free throw line than in his dunks. In Indianapolis, where China finished 12th, he was voted to the all-tournament team (an honor that eluded the members of the sixth-place U.S.) for flicking in threes, bouncing behind-the-back passes to back-door cutters and swatting away the shots of Elton Brand and Paul Pierce. Yao follows Robinson and Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs in the lithe, Russell tradition, but those two were low-post players who gradually moved outside. Like a football coach who sets up the run with the pass, Yao developed his perimeter game first. To complement his height—in the NBA, only the Mavericks' 2.28-m Shawn Bradley is taller—Yao has the thick rear and oak-trunk thighs that will help him establish position alongside Shaq when he's ready to assert himself in the low post.
Yao arrives just in time to exploit several emerging trends in the NBA. Now that big men can be double-teamed before receiving the ball, it is harder to feed the ones who do most of their scoring in the low post. Another incentive to move outside is the three-point line, and Yao has learned to take advantage of that—he looked comfortable swishing threes in May during his public workout for NBA teams in Chicago. "In the old days when you received two points for any kind of basket, sure, you'd rather have your big man trying to score from two feet [away] than to have someone else shooting from 17," says Boston Celtics coach Jim O'Brien. "But that's changed now that you get that third point. That's why you see Nowitzki and Garnett out there."
