Word: jianlian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...would prefer to watch the high-octane antics of the NBA rather than the second-rate efforts of their national league, where poor coaching and antiquated playbooks have stunted the game. It doesn't help, either, that China's best players, like Yao and the New Jersey Nets' Yi Jianlian, have fled the CBA for the klieg lights of the North American league. All in all, the CBA lost nearly $17 million last season, and the Shanghai club is among one of the most financially troubled teams in the league. (See pictures of street basketball in China...
...Chinese basketball needs all the help it can get. Talented players like Yao or the New Jersey Nets' Yi Jianlian tend to go abroad at the first opportunity. Games back in the Chinese Basketball Association league are uninspiring, hampered by poor coaching and a system focused more on rote drills than innovative play. Street play has picked up in recent years in Beijing and Shanghai, but that has yet to translate into a flood of dynamic national players. Despite its home-court advantage in Beijing last year, the Chinese Olympic hoops team made it only to the quarterfinal round before...
...showed they could star in the world's toughest league: the NBA, which plans to open a chain of retail outlets on the mainland in coming years, starting with a flagship store in Beijing. The success of Yao Ming, the towering center of the Houston Rockets, and now Yi Jianlian, the 7-ft. (2 m) forward for the Milwaukee Bucks, sends the message to kids on the playground that there's no limit to where they can end up if they're good enough...
...good he can be? I can't say that. But I think he'll be better than me.' YAO MING, all-star center for the Houston Rockets, on his fellow Chinese basketball player, rookie Yi Jianlian. The Rockets defeated Yi's Milwaukee Bucks in the two players' heavily hyped first-ever face-off, which drew as many as 200 million viewers in China
This was the same camp that Yi Jianlian had come through, exactly five years ago; it was, to be sure, about improving the young players' skills - how to run the pick and roll properly, how to use a screen, how to play good defense. But more than anything, it was about a huge global company trying to mine a market that it believes, justifiably, has almost limitless potential. Asked during one of the work- outs whether there was anyone in the current crop as good as Yi had been, former NBA star Schrempf answered bluntly - and honestly: "No." When...