Watching Yao progress and tear up every opposing center in the league leads me to believe he is and can compete, with the greats of all time. I have seen him hold his own against the great Shaquille O'neal as a rookie, and dominate good centers around the league. Such as Camby,Z,Dwight,Wallace brothers, Alonzo etc. He can now get the ball with ease, turnaround, and shoot over the likes of anyone. The only thing that ever held Yao back was conditioning,and fouls. The recent Yao can get up and down the court well and stay away from "uncoordinated big-men on guard" fouls. I try to imagine Yao posting the likes of Kareem, Dream, Moses, Wilt, Walton, Ewing, Robinson,etc, and every outcome is the same....He can get basket ater basket on any center that ever touched an NBA floor. He is just too tall, too skilled, and his shot is the softest we have ever seen from a big. If he can muscle Shaq and Dwight in to high percentage 6ft baby hooks, he can score on anyone. We are lucky as Rocket fans to have and watch such a dominant force that can only get better. We have ten years of unbelievable games from Yao and I cant wait to see what happens. Go rox
yao has done this before...had a great stretch of games, then went back to being his normal 19 & 8 self again. he is a very good player, but he is going to have to prove he can play like this everynight, season after season, to be considered an all time great. is the talent there? yes. the consistent effort and production isn't. i hope yao does become the dominant center that he can be, but he is going to have to earn being called great. a one or two week span of games doesn't earn that.
he may be able to score on all the guys you mentioned. but i would think at this point that those guys would outscore and out rebound him. im just saying that at this point. but if yao keeps improving in a year or two he may start achieving that level of play.
Yao is playing great, but I wouldn't quiet call him an "all-time great" already, that's very premature. Hopefully, with many more years of consistent dominance from him, he will certainly be in the conversation...not that many great big men in league history to begin with, so he would be in elite company.
Yao is a regular-sized guy (in NBA terms) on extremely long legs. There's no precedent for this that I know of. He can't do things that evenly proportioned big men have done in the past or can do today. However, he can do things they can't. Try to imagine Shawn Bradley shooting like Tracy McGrady -- preposterous. But Yao can do that, from 10 inches up, without leaving the ground. So yes, he can shoot their brains out, but rebounds and blocks will never come easy to him. Maybe one thing that's happened to Yao in the last couple of months, watching video of himself and coming back out on the court, is that he's learning what his weird body combo can and can't do. A lot of an athlete's progress as he grows older consists of learning his body's strengths and weaknesses and adjusting his game accordingly.
What I mean is that Yao is virtually unstoppable. No matter who it is, he is going to get his numbers. I know he cant be totally compared because of championships but if you look at scoring efficiency from the Center spot, he is among greats. Being 7-6 he has an advantage every night, It makes no difference if its Mo Taylor or Shaq or Kareem.
Maybe on offense he can compete, but not on d. Not in stamina. Not in athleticism. Being able to score til you're winded does not put him in the great category. He has the tools to be great, and he is improving, but he ain't there yet.
I see smalls guys like Kurt Thomas blocking his shot once in while. I don't think yao would stand a chance against Dream.
I love the improvement that Yao's been showing lately and I hope that it continues on a consistent basis. However, tis way too early to start counting Yao amongst the greats in any way. He's come a long way, but he's got quite a long way to yet. I am just glad to be along for the ride.
I'm just glad that there is even a hint of discussion of him turning out great. They guy has improved every year and has strung together a very strong stretch of the season since his injury. He's a legit 20/10 guy. If he is a 20/10 guy for the rest of his career and he can maintain a decent length to his career, then that's pretty darn good. He's not going to be Moses Malone or Hakeem, but I'll settle for him being one of the best centers in the league and still only being the second best player on the team. (I know T-Mac has been inconsistent this year, but he's had a rough year and I think he'll bounce back strong and retake his position as a top 5 player) Having Yao Ming and T-Mac locked up into long term deals through their prime years is a good problem to have. Winning long term and into the playoffs will totally depend on the role players they have that surround them. We've all seen how quickly rosters can completely change from year to year, so I think you'll see the Rockets find the right mix in the next couple of years to take them to the level of being competitors for the Championship. Heck, they were the darkhorse pick to be challenging for the Finals before they year began. It only took 6 of the original 12 players on the roster to go down with injury to knock them off of that.
Dream would own Yao so badly it's not even funny. Imagine this team with Yao versus this team with Dream. That's how big the difference is.
Yao is not at the same level as Dream, that's for sure. But I don't think the difference is that huge, especially with the fronting allowed these days. Yao doesn't jump so Dream can't fake Yao as he did Robinson. I think the stats will look like Yao at 2nd year against Shaq.
I always thought Hakeem pretty much got hacked to death on almost every play he had the ball, especially in the playoffs. It made me so mad when Shaq first came in the league. Hakeem would do a turn around fade away with one guy pushing him and the other guy slapping his forearm and he'd still make the shot. A foul would be called 10% of the time. Shaq (especially in his first few seasons) would literally get the ball in the post, put his shoulder into the defender, bowl the defender over, and dunk the ball. Foul on defender. Shaq was the new marketable superstar, so the refs altered the rules of the game so he could actually score. Hack-a-shaq contributes a ton of fouls for Shaq, but I'd love to see what percentage of fouls that were called on Shaq's defender were technically charges on Shaq if you played by the rules. Jordan also got TONS of leeway with refs. Michael Freakin' Jordan...the greatest basketball ever to live, and the refs had to give him the calls. Even Barkley got tons of calls his way, and is pretty much the only Houston Rocket I've ever seen get the calls his way all the time. I think JVG has a point. The refs in the NBA today do not know how to officiate big men...there really aren't that many true post up centers anymore that make a big impact on games. Shaq and Yao are the top 2, but Shaq is getting older and will soon be out of the league. I think Yao might go through a chunk of his career as the only true big man center that posts up in the NBA. A guy you could actually run the offense through as a post up center. The rules have also changed for the kind of talent the NBA contains today. Defenses can really hurt a big man's production down low now. I think you would see lower production by almost all the great centers of the 80s and 90s if they played in the current rule system. The fact that Yao has progressed to a true 20/10 guy with the current rule system shows how far he has come. He probably would score 3-4 more points a game in the old defensive system that Ewing, Robinson, and Hakeem played in. If they ever change the rules back (which they might, the NBA seems to like to change rules more than any other league to try to "fix" problems) you might see Yao's production take a spike.
Also remember, it was slow defenders that gave Hakeem more problems since they couldn't actually react fast enough to get faked out. Hakeem would turn, shake, bake, and a slow defender wouldn't even have time to get faked out...so he'd still be standing there when Hakeem came back around for the shot.
Wilt, Kareem, Russ, and Dream would all demolish Yao. He is too slow. He just would not often get a good shot off against such athletic, shot-blocking machines as those guys. Heck, Dream would not even let him get the ball above his waist in many instances. Yao looks great in this era of piss-poor centers, but he has a long way to go to be mentioned with the likes of those all time greats.
Depends. If Dream had to play by today's rules, he might have lasted two or three weeks before his head exploded from the frustration. Remember how badly Seattle's pseudo-zone was able to shut him down. Well, things are far worse today than even George Karl could dream: fronting and backing, double teaming before the ball arrives, the ridiculous no-charge zone, two handed checking, etc. If there were some way to go back to Dream's time, Yao would probably lay waste to the NBA of that era. I think it's way too early to classify Yao among the all-time greats, but we have to acknowledge how much he has accomplished despite having the rules so heavily stacked against him.
It's safe to say he's probably in the top 3 greatest chinese players to ever grace the earth though. I'd have to rank his parents above him since Pops always kicks your ass in a game of ball, and you cant beat mom.
I say Yao would demolish Wilt, Kareem, Russ, and Dream. Ok, take Dream out of that statement, since this is the Dream's land. Why? Because you have no way to prove it's a moronic, false statement. Even though it is. Do you? All I know is Shaq in his prime did not demolish rookie Yao, and ever since. Now this is a fact.
Ok, I'll bite. Regarding Dream specifically if you want to compare 4th year progress there's strong evidence that Dream would have problems facing Yao. Dream inexplicably had hell playing against Mark Eaton - even when Eaton was literally on his last good leg. His size seemed to bother every aspect of his game. But if you want to talk about '92-'97 Dream vs. Yao we'll have to wait at least two more years to be objective. Frankly if we're having this discussion in two years from now I'll be very happy.
