Ming’s Dynasty: Yao’s impact exceeds NBA, China
When you think about Yao Ming, the image of him running the court comes to mind. You wouldn’t necessarily call his stride graceful but it was never awkward, either. It just looked so out of place. He looked out of place. He was so massive he stood out in a crowd of some very tall folks.
Yao’s career belongs in the “what-if” bin. It has and will be be picked apart, dissected and looked at through every angle. People will write about how good he was, but only when he was healthy. They’ll write about how his Rockets were scary good on occasion but never made a serious playoff run. And maybe they’ll write of how he opened the NBA up to China.
He was all of these and still is. In so many ways, there’s never been somebody quite like Yao Ming before and there probably won’t be again, either.
It’s interesting to contrast him to another casualty of this lockout, Shaquille O’Neal. Himself a big man a singular kind. O’Neal’s career was relatively lucky; he spent most of his time playing on very good teams, with tremendous talents. Yao, however, wasn’t quite as lucky, either with teams or his health.
Like O’Neal, Yao is a once-in-a-generation personality, and he’s pretty funny too (he and Ron Artest made a good pair in the 2009 playoffs). Despite this, it will always be O’Neal, and not Yao, who is widely-touted as the NBA All-Star with the sense of humor. As Shaq rides to TNT in his retirement, one wonders where Yao will land.
Between 2002-03 and 2011, the Rockets went to the playoffs five times. They only finished under .500 once. In 2008, they won 22 games in a row, the second-longest win streak ever. Cumulatively, they finished with an average of 46 wins a season but only won a playoff series once. In that same 2002-11 stretch, Yao played more than 50 games just four times and only once in the last six seasons.
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If you want to judge him by the numbers he put up when he was on the court, they’re not bad either. He’s ranked 22nd in career PER and 20th in career Win Shares per 48 minutes. He was named to five All-NBA teams and played in eight All-Star Games.
Needless to say, Yao was not a bust, but it’s unfair to judge him by numbers alone. Yao Ming’s dynasty is the international impact he had on the game, most notably in building the Chinese basketball economy almost singlehandedly.
The Chinese Basketball Association has 17 teams. Like pro hockey in Europe, it’s a second-tier league behind its North American counterpart, and far from a joke. One may remember Stephon Marbury lacing up there, but don’t let that solely form your opinion. That it’s turned out both Yao Ming and YI Jianlian shows it’s no better or worse than the NCAA, arguably.
It’s a misconception to say western sports aren’t popular in eastern Asia. Japan has multi-leveled driving ranges and an accomplished baseball league. North Korea’s Dear Leader – Kim Jong-Il – is alleged to be a scratch golfer, once hitting something like nine holes-in-one, not to mention a reputed NBA fan. And perhaps most importantly, basketball is huge in China, and gaining.
According to a 2008 New York Times story, the NBA was broadcast on 51 channels in China, gaining a cool 1.6 billion viewers in the process. NBA items are sold at 30,000 retailers. There are two NBA stores in Beijing, whereas the one in New York City closed earlier this year.
As you may remember from geography class, China is still a communist country; as good as Wayne Gretzky was, he never sold Oilers jerseys in Moscow.
Yao existed beyond politics. He never littered post-game scrums with Mao Zedong-isms, nor did he openly embrace a capitalist society at his home’s expense. The negative aspects of his home country never really seemed to come up and he never spoke up against them, either. He may have stopped eating shark fin soup, but he never advocated for the release of Liu Xiaobo.
But then, he was an athlete, not a role model.
In the Free Darko book, Yao was described as the greatest Asian player of all time. ESPN‘s Bill Simmons once called him the next Bill Walton. Both are true and encompass both sides of who Yao was and what he is. Like Walton, he was betrayed by injuries but thrives with a great sense of humor.
Yao Ming is more than just a Chinese-born player and he’s more than a what-if. He represents the idea of a world basketball player with physical gifts that seemed out of this world, somebody who quite easily existed apart from the narrow, North American-first concerns and issues around professional sports.
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