The fact is Yao is a damn good center in today's NBA, but I just don't see how he could be as dominated as D. Robinson, Dream and Shaq used to be in every game. These guys had great athleticism even in their rookie year, super quick, fast like a guard and had great stamina, they were never tired while running up and down on the court. But that era is gone, even though Shaq is still there and lost a lot of weight, I doubt he can be as dominated as he was in 3, 4 years ago because of his age. The games are more and more decided by guards and we got T-Mac, one of best guards in the NBA, and Yao is more than enough to be a complement to him. We should be excited about the new season, I expect two unselfish stars play great team ball. The season should be fun to watch.
Yao DID look quicker, especially in the first quarter... he was quicker hustling out to pick up the open man on the perimeter on defense, quicker to the basket, as well. Basically, he was noticeably quicker in the half-court. As others have said, Yao's never going to be a Hakeem where he can just gallop from one end of the court to the other, though. Yao didn't look worn out during the game, and while he didn't play a lot of minutes, let's not forget he was facing Shaq. Overall, I'd say that he has indeed made noticeable conditioning improvements, but nothing that's going to change his game dramatically.
yao might seem quicker, but he sure also slow down quick still. If teams start to run, he's dead basically.
yao needs to improve his rebounding and outlet passing to get the break going without him having to be so involved in the running...w/tmac im sure there will be many opportunities didnt catch all of the first quarter but from what i did see yao did an incredible job keeping shaq from getting good post position. he definetly seems stronger in that regard. in fact, yao was getting deeper in the post than shaq halfway through their court time together. i had reservations about howard and lue but each seemed to fill his respective role very well. tmac didnt get involved as much as i expected. hard to say how he will look as a rocket from this one game. on limited minutes, mutumbo had spring. could be a semi defensive monster again.
I was just happy as hell to see a point guard who knows how to run a fast break. C Ward was directing traffic on the break and knows how to find the open man. I saw it more in the first half of last night's game than I saw all of last year. What a relief!!
what happened to the videos, I thought ROX2k was doing something as well? It ain't that big of a deal -it's still a preseason game- but I would still luv to see the 10 mins of the dynamic duel play together for the first time. thks in advance to anyone who put in the trouble for us out of towners.
R2K and I talked about it last night working out some bugs hopefully he'll have something up for you guys "somewhere else" soon
LegendZ: Use bt. Once we get it started, i'm sure there will be no less than 30 people participating.
