Chron: Choose Yao on Purely Basketball Terms

Yao choice must be made on purely basketball terms
By DALE ROBERTSON
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle

Watching Shaq Daddy throw his tonnage around against the Kings on Friday night made it impossible not to further ponder the flat-out terrifying decision confronting the Rockets as the NBA's prime-time draft gala looms.

To say yes or no to Yao, to Ming or not to Ming, that is the mother of all questions Leslie Alexander, Carroll Dawson and Rudy Tomjanovich must come to terms with before June 26. The future of their down-in-the-dumps, almost moribund franchise rests on what they do with the No. 1 pick, improbably won in the lottery two weeks ago.

If one is to beat the Lakers, who own what the Rockets want back -- the NBA championship -- at least through this morning, Shaquille O'Neal must be neutralized, straight up by a monster center or by a mix featuring the kind of multifaceted players Sacramento possesses.

Or, better, using both. Perhaps the Rockets aren't far away on the latter, but it's clear they don't come close on the former. Kelvin Cato, at his best, is more quack than Shaq. But, you look at Yao Ming's 7 feet, 5 inches and you can't help not thinking that, with toughening up, 50 more pounds and a couple of years of seasoning ...

Stop right there. The Rockets have missed the playoffs three springs running. Their attendance is the worst in the NBA for a team not fleeing to greener pastures and in 17 months they'll have nearly 3,000 additional seats to fill. Can they afford to wait on Yao to develop from an intriguing curiosity into a fully Shaq-proof NBA center?

It's not a sportswriter's call. Only you fans can answer that. You're the ones who must buy the pricey season tickets and promise renewed patience. If the Rockets could get same from you in writing, in the form of cash on the barrel, drafting Yao becomes the ultimate no-brainer.

But they can't, so he's a Sam Bowie-sized gamble. And you remember how badly Bowie busted after being picked by Portland between Hakeem Olajuwon and Michael Jordan 18 years ago.

What the Rockets must do, absent any solemn guarantees from you customers, is keep their focus 100 percent on Yao's prospects as a basketball player in the here and now. Which is to say there are two things they must not do:

· Draft Ming because he's Chinese.

· Don't draft him because he's Chinese.

The second point is an issue only because the Rockets have received grumpy feedback critical of how the Chinese Basketball Association has joined itself to Yao's hip, demanding half his pre-tax NBA income and his future services at the snap of its finger. In short, giving Ming millions means giving a corrupt, authoritarian, human-rights-violating, pinko-communist bureaucracy millions, too.

This would be a valid objection if it wasn't true that every major American company with consumer products to sell, from burgers to band width to basketball, is desperate to gain a foothold in the billion-consumers-strong Chinese economy. It's a little late for any U.S. corporate entity, whether it's McDonald's or the NBA, to stand on principle and refuse to do business with the world's 8,000-pound panda.

And such a stance would be absurdly counterproductive anyway. The more financially entangled we become with the Chinese, the more likely it is that we will forge a permanent peaceful alliance with them as well.

More worrisome on the local front are indications the Rockets have come to see drafting Yao as a clever marketing ploy, gaining them lucrative inroads into Houston's prosperous Asian community. Some 135,000 Chinese-Americans live in the area, as do 185,000 Vietnamese-Americans, and neither group has been exactly hoops crazy. For the most part, they have ignored the Rockets, and the Rockets have ignored them.

But if drafting Yao would mean selling several thousand season tickets to a new audience, it suddenly becomes well worth their while from a financial perspective.

The Rockets are schmoozing prominent Houston Asians, and they asked Mayor Lee Brown to cozy up to China's basketball pooh-bahs on his recent junket to the country. The feeling seems to be that we must prove our worthiness to them, showing how we aren't a backwater populated by hicks who think chop suey in a can is Chinese cuisine. In reality, the burden of proof should rest solely on Yao. Can he play in the NBA at a high level? Can he be a true force, one worthy of the top overall choice?

All that can be established today, unfortunately, is that he has fabulous potential. How he develops will depend on his work ethic, his mental strength -- from which will follow the requisite physical courage -- and his ability to stay upright over an 82-game season unlike any he has been through in China, where basketball is a quasi-ballet.

As a teen-aged Gulliver, Yao is said to have suffered stress fractures in his ankles. Although recent X-rays show no trace of the damage, such a history scares the dickens out of the Rockets' orthopedist, Dr. Walt Lowe, who admits he would feel more comfortable signing off on Ming if he could give him a thorough once-over.

But such an examination doesn't appear to be possible. Therefore, for that reason, it behooves the Rockets to go to extreme lengths to find a creative alternative for using the No. 1 choice, one fraught with fewer perilous uncertainties.

Yao is no slam dunk. The only certainty? At the outset of Ming's NBA career, the Shaq-meister will slam-dunk him.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/sports/bk/bkn/rox/1435846