Oh **** man, it's all Hakeem's fault! Seriously man, stop going to India, it's not about you anymore!
Hehe, just kiddin, but for real, nobody should mess with Chuck Hayes. First Shaq, now Yao, I told you Chuck was gonna be vicious this year.
Oh yeah, Merry Christmas people!
jeez... Hakeem... no more going to india!
That wasn't Chuck's fault... well it wasn't like he did it on purpose, blame Tim Thomas.. he's the one that rolled! Plus you can add Etan Thomas to that list.. he banged knees with Chuck too (and bumped Deke's elbow the same game).
Between Deke and Chuck we have a wrecking crew on our team.
This Week In Sports History
Jan. 19-23, 1963:
Seven-foot-tall Houston Rockets center Hakeem "The Dream" Olajuwon is born over the course of five days in Lagos, Nigeria. Though he never grew a single inch from birth onwards—a source of some embarrassment to his tradition-minded 10-foot-tall Yoruba family—it did little to hamper his Hall of Fame career.
This Week In Sports History
Jan. 19-23, 1963:
Seven-foot-tall Houston Rockets center Hakeem "The Dream" Olajuwon is born over the course of five days in Lagos, Nigeria. Though he never grew a single inch from birth onwards—a source of some embarrassment to his tradition-minded 10-foot-tall Yoruba family—it did little to hamper his Hall of Fame career.
This Week In Sports History
Jan. 19-23, 1963:
Seven-foot-tall Houston Rockets center Hakeem "The Dream" Olajuwon is born over the course of five days in Lagos, Nigeria. Though he never grew a single inch from birth onwards—a source of some embarrassment to his tradition-minded 10-foot-tall Yoruba family—it did little to hamper his Hall of Fame career.
Don't say it: You're sick of the subject already. But Slate magazine published a cogent essay last week on Yao Ming, written by a fellow named Robert Weintraub, the producer for the "Asian Basketball Show" who claims to have seen the Chinese center "outplayed more times than I'd like to remember." And since this is the month in which you can't take anything a GM says seriously, you might be interested in hearing what he has to say.
Weintraub wrote, "I can still close my eyes and see him being dominated by Korean big-man Seo Jang Hoon, a player lifeless enough to earn the nickname 'The Tin Man.' I remember the Lebanese national team bullying around the Chinese Tower of Glower until the game ended in an ugly brawl (with one Chinese player wielding a pair of scissors). And I vividly recall the Sydney Olympics, where Yao made his reputation off two early rejections of overaggressive Dream Teamers, but then picked up four quick fouls and found himself on the bench."
His conclusion: "Yao won't be a complete bust. On the big-man scale, he still comes up north of Gheorghe Muresan. I also like him better than the player he's inevitably compared to, Shawn Bradley, if only because Yao is a better athlete and younger than the Mormon Mosquito when he came to the NBA. But he'll never approach Rik Smits' achievements, such as they were."
Weintraub also predicts a long and frustrating battle to gain Yao's loyalty for the team that selects him, and claims that it is a battle that the team cannot win.
"Even if (the NBA team) works out a short-term arrangement for Yao to spend off-season time with the national club, the Chinese government is likely to want to change the deal at any time, depending on shifts in the political wind," Weintraub wrote. "Unlike European players, Yao is hard-wired to do what the motherland tells him to. This, after all, is someone who has credited his size and uniqueness to China's one-child-per-family policy. Should he forget his upbringing, entities in China will waste little time in reminding him -- by increasing tax rates in his family's neighborhood, by making it difficult for friends and family to obtain visas in order to see him play, or by simply barring him from representing China in any fashion (a fate that befell poor Ma Jian, who played at the University of Utah and dared to try out for the Utah Jazz without permission from above)."
The reason for this, of course, is that the Chinese government couldn't care less about Yao's success in the NBA. Its only agenda is to get back a better player so that China can contend for a medal at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. If his performance here reflects well on China, that's fine. But if he helps the Houston Rockets win a title and China keeps losing its international competitions, "that would be an intolerable trade-off," Weintraub says.
The Sticky Thread
WTF?
