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Joe Alexander to play with Yi?

Tuesday, 24th June 2008 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (0)

When we first mentioned basketball player Joe Alexander here, he was projected by ESPN's Chad Ford as the 13th pick in the NBA Draft, going to the Portland Trailblazers. One month and six mock drafts later, Ford has Alexander going eighth to the Milwaukee Bucks. What are they so excited about? Among other things, dunks like this one:

The 6'8" small forward from West Virginia University spent most of his early basketball years in Beijing, Taiwan and Hong Kong before moving to the Maryland to finish high school. If he ends up playing with the Milwaukee Bucks, it would mean that Chinese player Yi Jianlian has a teammate with whom he can share more cultural common ground. And if rumors about Alexander's language skills are true, he'd also have a fellow Mandarin speaker on the team.

It would also mean huge endorsement potential for Alexander in China, should he begin to put together a solid NBA career. If Houston Rockets role player and non-Mandarin speaker Shane Battier can get a shoe deal here, what's the potential for an explosive young player who knows the country and the language?

As his draft prospects improve, Alexander is getting more media attention, and that attention is looking a little more closely at his years in China.

In an article on U.S. college sports Web site Rivals.com, Adrian Wojnarowski looks at what motivated Alexander in high school and college.

Of his habit of spending so much time in the WVU gym that he would sleep in the locker room, Alexander gave a response that would make any Chinese model worker proud:

"It wasn't like I was putting in 12 hours a day there," he said. "But it was really a product of my mentality toward what I'm doing in life. Why do I need to go home? What am I going to do there? Watch TV? I had nothing else going in my life. Nothing else mattered. At night, I just need someplace soft to sleep. And the couch in the locker room was fine."

He also said several things that indicated how different his perspective was from his American teammates', including this:

"I always felt over there that the idea wasn't to be good when you started, but work hard and become good eventually. Here, I get the sense that it's too much of, 'I'm not good at basketball, so that means I'm not going to be good.' That shouldn't be the mentality."

We can't wait to see how his nickname, "Vanilla Sky," translates into Mandarin. How about 香草天堂？

Tags: basketball, Joe Alexander, NBA, Yi Jianlian