I have no problems with the part I quoted. Just about every game I ever watched the thought crossed my mind: How can the NBA be so stupid as to intentionally limit Yao? It made bad business sense and even worse basketball sense. i kept wanting Yao to lose his cool and call refs out, thinking that might make a difference, but it was never his way and probably would not have made much difference. Fact is, the NBA has a reffing problem that goes beyond Yao and they are blind if they can't see it is affecting their bottom line and it will get much worse if they don't fix it now.
If people keep paying money to watch and follow then it won't matter, even if the NBA won't be as great as it could be. All NBA has to do is make money. It doesn't have to be a good product.
Whups, first part of post got misquoted. Sleepy Conspiracy theory: NBA wanted to limit Yao to be anti racist. If Yao was immensely successful, people might wonder why blacks aren't more successful academically when an asian can be successful in basketball.
All three of them are getting/got horrible calls. Its because they're mostly bigger than their opponent, the refs think they could "handle" it. Its hard to say whether Yao was officiated worse than Shaq or DH, Shaq and DH would get routinely clipped while trying to dunk the ball or grabbing a reb. Yao always gets whistled by refs but he doesn't get beaten up like Shaq or DH. We know this because Yao has such an unstable core if he gets hit with medium force he falls down. Most of the hits he takes are of the "cheap" variety when the refs aren't looking rather than elbows to the ribs that Shaq and DH receives.
" An online poll on Weibo by Monday lunchtime showed that 57 percent of respondents would stop watching the NBA after Yao's retirement. " There goes Kobe's idea for a chinese tour.
That's not the reason why I say he's treated differently. Dwight Howard and (especially) Shaq can dish it out as much as they take it. I have never seen Yao trying to be physical with his defender without getting called for a foul. It's like the refs have to protect those 6-10 guys from the big bad mean 7-6 guy who wants some space to shoot his jumper.
Just FYI, I am not a Yao Only Fan. My alliteration posted many times on this board for the big three a few years ago were: Tofu, Testy and T-Slack. Hardly what a Yao Only Fan would post. Sheesh.
I agree that both Shaq and Dwight were also really badly officiated. What the NBA doesn't get is that I didn't buy tickets to see Howard, Lebron (the blessed one who hardly ever fouls according to the NBA), or Kobe sit on the bench with two early fouls. The same was particularly true for Yao when he played. It was very annoying and made me greatly reduce my expenditure on NBA games. I'm not sure why the NBA prefers to defend their refs than defend the truth (by using replays, etc.). It is pretty disgusting if you ask me ... yet another reason why the NFL >>> NBA.
It is pretty clear that the market has decided that it doesn't have a good product. Both basketball purists and people with money clearly recognize this.
If I were Yao I would hate to play in a league where getting beat up on both sides of the court was okay. He didn't sign a wrestling contract, he signed a contract to play basketball.
Yup, everything's about sense of fair play and NBA is worst at it. That's why even inferior players in NCAA have a more popular product in their tournament than NBA could ever hope for.
Uh....Yeah..... Ratings are up and even Stern said this has been the most succesful season in about 12 years. I seriously doubt the league lost 1.5 billion dollars. The leagues problem is that it has overpaid marginal players and priced out the average fan from going to a game. The league, however, is more popular than ever
Damn dude can't you be like the rest of us and keep it simple? This is AMERICA. Hate the A-rabs, people with different political/social/religious viewpoints from ours, sportsfans from the "other" university in the state (UT, UH, A&M, Baylor, and/or Rice SUCK AMIRITE) and your mother in law. Obviously as an American I believe in needlessly injecting morality into every little damn thing to feel better about myself but hating people who dislike bad officiating is too much work. Yao's retirement will certainly hurt the NBA among low-interest Chinese. Just like Jordan's retirement permanently reduced the footprint of the NBA in the US. But the article misses the point. First over his career Yao has brought in millions of fans and millions of participants in the sport. That's a legacy that is REAL and will continue to pay huge dividends both for Darth Stern and for the CBA (Chinese league). Second Yao was going to retire at some point. Whether it's 2011 or 2016 the downward bump was coming. Stern knew it was coming. The only question is did Stern do his due duty for once and prepare NBA China for this or did he **** it up like he does everything
Jordan may have opened the door to NBA globally (for the US it was Bird/Magic that revived NBA, but global media was not as accessible during their prime years) but Yao definitely brought forth millions of fans from China to the NBA. Kobe and AI didn't become popular in China, unless they were already die-hard NBA fans to begin with, until they learned more about the NBA through the introduction of the league by following Yao. I'm sure many started off as YOF but ended up becoming a fan of the game and other players, which was only made possible by Yao.
