I could see this China/USA game going one of two ways. Either the US turns up the fullcourt pressure and runs China out of the gym. Or China slows the game down with the zone and makes it competitive because the US's zone busting is still very shakey.
Predictied outcome of China-USA game: Yao: 50 points USA: 115 points Rest of the China team: 10 points. china loses 115-60
Because Italy is probably one of only 2 games in this pool that Chinese have a good chance to win, the other game being vs. Senegal. I'm not sure if they will even try against the US. Now that they lost to Italy, they have to try to win against Slovania/PR if they want to make it through to the next round.
That's exactly what's gonna happen. CNT will get 20+ turnovers and Yao won't play too long - This is a meaningless game to CNT, the game with Italy was one they played for winning.
fair point with the strategy. I guess now we will see if that's how it will be played against the US. if he actually doesn't play yao a ton of minutes against the US then I will retract my dumb comment.
WOW, from those pics, Yao looks like he was dominant. Lots of dunk pics unless they are different views of the same one. Anybody found the BT link for the game yet?
this torrent link was found by shokenchi of the yao forum. http://nnv.dl1.btchina.net/download.php?s=c799861078634175&attachmentid=763835
Actually, Italy is the second best team in the group behind the US. They were the silver medalists at the 2004 Athens Olympics (ahead of the US, who finished third). I'm actually surprised that China played this well against the Italians. I had expected an early blowout.
But this Italian team has only 4 players who also played for that silver medalist team, and their not-that-great front court has been further weakened (it is said that their tallest player only ranks 5th in CNT). As we all saw, if Yao and Wang (who shot 1-10 in this game) were all 100%, the result would be different.
That's unreal. 57% beyond the arc but only 36% inside. The Italians must have worked so hard on their 3 pts shots that they forgot to practice doing layups.
Their low % inside is due to the Yao & Yi and Yao & Wang duo. Guess they figure out that a layup might just equal to a block or even a turn over...
