Chron: Hornets' Davis makes a cell phone call to the Franchise about Yao

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/sports/1691394

Dec. 5, 2002, 10:59PM

Hornets' Davis gets another look at Yao
By JONATHAN FEIGEN


NEW ORLEANS -- The buzzer still echoing, Baron Davis went straight to the cell phone. The USA Basketball senior national team had just faced Yao Ming and the Chinese national team, and before Davis would catch his breath or a shower, he had to reach out and touch someone.

Steve Francis' summer immediately improved.

"I told him before the game to try to dunk on him," Francis said. "But after the game, he called me like this (snapping his fingers). I mean, he went right to the locker room and called and said, `Yo, your big guy is really going to be good. He's really going to help y'all out.' He just kept saying that. `He's really going to help you.' "

Davis will get another look at Yao tonight when the Rockets face the Hornets in New Orleans. But Davis needed only one glimpse to have seen enough.

"The guy can play," Davis said then. "I like him a lot. My boy Steve Francis is a good friend of mine, and he's going to have a good time with that big guy down there."

Davis already has proved to be a skilled scout.

The trick now, as it was when Yao was still with the Chinese national team, is getting Yao's hands on the ball. If the Rockets get him the ball, good things generally have happened. His 64.8-percent shooting leads the league, an accomplishment no rookie has claimed for an entire season since Jerry Lucas broke in with the Cincinnati Royals in the 1963-64 season when he made 52.7 percent.

Even beyond Yao's accurate shooting, he has helped key the Rockets' offense with sharp passing out of double teams. On Tuesday, he burned the Spurs with his shooting and passing, scoring 27 points and collecting three assists that did not reflect the passes that led to passes and easy baskets.

But few teams have played behind Yao as the Spurs did throughout the first half on Tuesday. The Spurs mixed in a few moments in a zone in the first half, but the Rockets have done well getting Yao the ball against zones. The problem has been keeping him as involved against fronting defenses.

When the Spurs fronted Yao in the second half, he took just four shots, and just one came on a pass to the low post. When Yao had his career-high 30 against the Mavericks, he had 21 in the first half against Dallas' zone but was slowed in the second half when he was fronted in a box-and-one.

On the Rockets' five-game road trip, when teams routinely surrounded Yao as the Spurs did not, he averaged just 5.2 shots per game. But that was enough to have Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich anxiously awaiting his chance to put in new wrinkles, and entirely new plays, to get Yao the ball against defenses he is certain to see, beginning tonight against a team that routinely fronts centers in the low post.

"I think it will definitely take away from my ability to some degree," Yao said. "Since people are already double teaming me, it's something I am used to, and I like passing the ball.

"I think the fact their defense on me is getting a lot more active and aggressive shows they respect me more."

The past eight games, beginning with Yao's breakthrough in Dallas, have increasingly showed the Rockets' offense to be at its best when Yao is involved in the offense.

"That's all we did at practice, work at ways to get the ball inside to Yao and Mo (Taylor)," Francis said. "One thing coach always does is he analyzes the situation and finds ways to get guys the ball where they like it. It took him awhile to find out I like pick-and-roll. He thought I liked isolations, but I like pick-and-roll better. So he put in new plays for Yao and Mo. And we already had the most plays of anybody in the NBA.

"It's easy. It's good basketball."

To Taylor, the past two days brought him back to the Rockets' best stretch since he joined the team before the 2000-2001 season, before and after that season's all-star break. The Rockets kept the offense in Hakeem Olajuwon's and Taylor's hands and put together a four-game winning streak. They have not won even that many in a row since.

"Dream and I really got it going," Taylor said. "It was that type of practice. It really felt like that. Yao and I got a lot of touches. It was fun. We worked on post things, worked with perimeter guys working with post guys. We worked on different ways to get us the ball easier so we don't have to work as hard to get the ball or don't get the ball out of position.

"Sometimes if you throw Yao the ball and he's fighting, fighting and gets pushed off the block, then he's too far away from the basket. We want to keep him in close to the basket, and get him the ball quicker, easier so he could be more effective."

Tomjanovich said the changes in defensive rules have made getting the ball inside more difficult, much more "complicated" than in Olajuwon's prime. He described this week's practices as "tedious" and "nerve-wracking."

"Everybody wants to just come down, get in position and throw it in and go to work," Tomjanovich said. "When Dream was here, we spent a lot of time working on that."

With Yao developing so quickly, they went back to work on getting the ball to the center until one could almost hear Olajuwon's mantra, "That's just basketball. That's not me. That's the position."

"Early on Steve and Cat (Cuttino Mobley) had to work so hard to get their shots," Moochie Norris said. "Now with Yao Ming in there drawing double teams because you can't guard him one-on-one because he is so big, it takes the pressure off a lot of guys.

"I'm glad we have the inside threat because I believe that's the way basketball has always been. It's supposed to go inside-out, instead of outside-in. If you don't have anything on the inside working for you, it's going to be hard for the perimeter guys to get shots. If we can get it inside, it can be easy."