Yi traded to Washington
Saturday, 3rd July 2010 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (2)
Yi Jianlian will start his fourth NBA season playing with his third team, after being traded by the New Jersey Nets to the Washington Wizards earlier this week.The Nets acquire Quinton Ross, who has a $1.2 million contract, in the trade, and get rid of Yi's $4.5 million salary. That will leave them with about $30 million in salary cap space to try and lure some of this summer's top free agents. Lebron James, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh and David Lee are some of the players still up for grabs.
Yi, who averaged 12 points and 7 rebounds this season, joins number one draft pick John Wall at Washington (Wizards' roster), as well as late-round pick Hamady Ndiaye from Senegal via Rutgers University, and like Yi, 7 feet tall. Any team that picks up Yi is taking on a project—the forward is still unpolished, and missed more than a third of this season due to various injuries.
Tags: basketball, NBA, New Jersey Nets, Washington Wizards, Yi Jianlian
Yi's bloody lip, Del Harris's CCTV-5 airtime
Monday, 7th December 2009 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (1)
Yi Jianlian's return from the historically horrendous New Jersey Nets' injured reserve was delayed further when he took a hit to the face in a post-practice 3-on-3 game that required 50 stitches to his lip. Yi had been expected to return to the lineup against the New York Knicks Sunday. New Jersey went on to lose the battle of the embarrassingly bad Big Apple teams, and is now just one loss away from dropping five times as many games as Yi has played in this season. Yi is joined on the bench now by an old friend--Del Harris, the retired NBA coach who has been brought on as an assistant.
Del Harris with young Chinese ballers in 2008.
Harris' choice for his return to the bench--the team with the only (sort of) active Chinese player in the NBA--is an interesting one. Harris coached China at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and gave the then supposedly 16-year-old Yi a bigger role on the team. He has made several trips to China since, including joining John Calipari when he brought the University of Memphis to play a series against the Chinese National Team months before the Beijing Olympics. Harris returned for the Beijing games, and was in China again this fall for the FIBA Asia Championship in Tianjin. He recently launched a Web site in China in conjunction with Scottie Pippen and Donnie Nelson. Wohoops.com (translation, My Hoops) is a basketball social networking site that also offers original instructional video content. When Harris visited Guangdong with Calipari in 2008, he donned a crisp white polo with the Wohoops.com logo for their joint coaching clinic, and he was accompanied on the trip by representatives from Blastoff Ventures, which is also involved in the startup.
Hmm... It's starting to look more understandable why Harris would leave the cozy confines of his Texas home to spend the winter back up north coaching one of the worst teams in the history of the league--Wofreemarketing.
Related:
Can these guys fix how China hoops?
Netsdaily.com: For Yi, it all started with Harris
Tags: basketball, Del Harris, Donnie Nelson, New Jersey Nets, Scottie Pippen
Yi Jianlian celebrates National Games reprieve with a double-double
Monday, 19th October 2009 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (0)
But someone in China didn't want Yi in those games. Guangdong, his hometown team and a favorite at China's national games going on right now in Shandong, reportedly had a deal with the Milwaukee Bucks (the team that drafted Yi in 2007) that would have had Yi back in China for the last two weeks of October, missing the start of the NBA season. But Yi's new team, the New Jersey Nets, has no such agreement.
It may seem crazy to think that Yi would be required to miss the start of his third NBA season to play against a bunch of guys who couldn't even ride the bench for a team in a major NCAA conference. But conflicts between Chinese interests, Chinese players, and NBA interests also had huge impacts on the careers of Yi's predecessors, Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi. For Wang (drafted by the Dallas Mavericks in 1999), a disagreement about whether he would miss the start of his second season to play for Team China in the Asian Games was the beginning of the end of an abbreviated NBA career. And Yao, after the negotiation of his release seven years ago from the Shanghai Sharks of the CBA, has balanced his work between the Houston Rockets and the Chinese National Team.
Related:
NJ.com: Yi Jianlian still seems the best option at power forward for the Nets
ESPN the Magazine: The reeducation of Lt. Wang
Yi Jianlian image: Gzxw.com.cn
Tags: 2009 National Games, CBA, NBA, New Jersey Nets, Wang Zhizhi, Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian
Yao and Yi's Trade Talk
Monday, 22nd June 2009 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (1)
Last year, draft day eve saw a trade that moved Guangdong native Yi Jianlian from the Milwaukee Bucks to the New Jersey Nets. A year later, the shine has dulled on Yi's move to a bigger market with a bigger Chinese-American population and a hope of landing Lebron James in 2010. The power forward played showed some consistent strong play in January before getting injured and then never returning to form the rest of the season. He averaged 8.6 points and 5.3 rebounds. Yi has three years left on a $15.6 million contract with the Nets.
While Yi might not have earned his $3 million on the court for the Nets last year, a recent piece in the New York Daily News indicates that the team likes his marketability in China. Yi is China's third most influential celebrity, according to Forbes' annual ranking of Chinese celebrities. The Daily News piece says that Nets CEO Brett Yormark is currently in China meeting with executives from 33 different companies with the goal of signing four or five new deals.
Yao Ming, by far China's biggest sports star, has been talked about for a move to Cleveland ever since news broke of a group led by Chinese businessman Huang Jianhua, aka Kenneth Huang, working on a deal to buy a 15 percent stake in the Cleveland Cavaliers. So far, it amounts to little more than a Chinese fan's fantasy of bringing Yao together with 2009 NBA MVP Lebron James. Yao's got two years left on his contract, with the freedom to opt out on the last year, in which he would make $17 million if he chose to stick around. He's been a Rocket for all of his seven-year career and is the face of the franchise, both for fans and for opposing teams--beating the Rockets means stopping Yao (if, of course, he's healthy).
Yao added a little fuel to the rumors earlier this week with his vague talk in an interview with Shanghai television station. "It is still an unknown," was his response to questions about a possible move to Cleveland.
Related:
Chinese investors buying stake in Cavs
Yi, Jay-Z and Lebron?
Lebron, Yao image: Blogcn.com
Tags: basketball, Cleveland Cavaliers, Houston Rockets, Huang Jianhua, Kenneth Huang, NBA, New Jersey Nets, Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian
Yao Ming to start in his sixth All-Star game
Friday, 23rd January 2009 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (1)
Yao Ming (姚明） will make his sixth All-Star game appearance next month, after being voted into the starting lineup for the Western Conference team with 2,532,958, Yao's former vote-getting record of 2,558,278, set in 2004-05, was passed by five players this year, including Eastern Conference starting center Dwight Howard, who received 3,150,181 votes.New Jersey Nets forward Yi Jianlian did not surpass Kevin Garnett in Eastern Conference voting, and will not appear in the game (the rest of the All-Stars will be selected by NBA coaches, and Yi is not considered a contender for one of these spots).
Tags: basketball, Houston Rockets, NBA, New Jersey Nets, Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian
Yi out with injury
Saturday, 10th January 2009 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (1)
Just as he was beginning to put together a string of solid performances, New Jersey Nets forward Yi Jianlian (易建联) got injured Thursday night in his first game against his former team. Yi, who had scored 13, 20 and 22 points in the last three games, broke his right pinkie finger late in the third quarter, and the Nets lost to the Milwaukee Bucks, 104-102.Yi will miss three to four weeks, according to this AP report.
Tags: NBA, New Jersey Nets, Yi Jianlian
Yao and Rockets dominate Yi and Nets
Tuesday, 23rd December 2008 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (0)
As expected, Yao Ming outshone his countryman Yi Jianlian and the Houston Rockets picked apart the New Jersey Nets, in a 114-91 win Monday night. Yao had a double double--24 points and 16 rebounds--while Yi just barely reached double digits in scoring with 10 points on 4-for-13 shooting.Controversy continues to buzz around Yi. He claims to be 21, born in 1987, but he's long been suspected to be a couple of years older. A reporter with Sports Illustrated's Chinese-language magazine claims to have found middle school records listing the forward as being born in 1984. Yi denies the reports and Nets general manager Kiki Vandeweghe has said he is not concerned about the issue.
Tags: Houston Rockets, New Jersey Nets, Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian
Yao vs. Yi: Game Three
Monday, 22nd December 2008 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (0)
The only two Chinese players currently in the starting lineup for NBA teams will face off in New Jersey Monday night, at 7:30 p.m. EST (8:30 a.m. Tuesday Beijing time). It is the third meeting, and the first this year, for Yao Ming (姚明) and Yi Jianlian (易建联). The game will air live on CCTV's sports channel.The Houston Chronicle's Jonathan Feigen broke down in Sunday's paper why this year's Yao-Yi meeting won't match last year's for fanfare--Yao is focused on leading a surging Rockets team that is a serious playoff contender, and seems to see Yi and the Nets as just another opponent that needs to go down.
Yao has had a strong season so far, averaging 20 points and 9.5 rebounds a game. He has averaged 27 points over the last three games and was clutch in a weekend win over the Minnesota Timberwolves. His team has won five of its last six games.
Yi and the Nets are a different story. The team has dropped five of its last seven games, and Yi is averaging 10 points and 6 rebounds. He did notch a double-double against Dallas last Friday, but he's been held to one or fewer field goals six times this season.
Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian image: Tianjin Daily
Tags: basketball, Houston Rockets, NBA, New Jersey Nets, Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian
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