Dwight Howard is the best center in the NBA, live with it.

Yes, but Hakeem wasn't severely undersized at his position. Yao, on other hand, is seriously disadvantaged with his lack of quickness/agility.

Hakeem had average size, above-average strength, and above average quickness/agility well into his 30s. That provided a sufficient base for him to expand his skills and improve his overall offensive game.

Yao's weaknesses are more pronounced, and it puts more limits on ways his offensive game can expand. He's never going to be a player who can face up and create of the dribble. He's never going to be a guy with nimble footwork, who can spin and fake in multiple directions to get his defender off balance. He's never going to be someone who's explosive around the basket, or a guy who can adjust his shot in the air to avoid getting blocked.

So, how can Yao realistically improve? He can become more accurate on his jump hook and turn around jumper, I suppose. Though he'll already very good on those, so it's hard to see that getting much better. He can become more savvy in drawing fouls at the basket with well-timed pump fakes. Perhaps he can improve as a passer in Adelman's system, though I have my doubts that'll ever happen for him. He just doesn't seem comfortable in that role.

Hakeem had more ways to expand his game, and he didn't have any glaring limitations that could hurt his team. Yao has less scope for improvement, and I think the natural regression in other parts of his game (e.g. ability to run down the court, ability to rebound in traffic, ability to defend away from the basket) will be difficult for him to offset. It's not something we should expect.

You say this as if Yao is a young player. Yao is plenty mature, and he as plenty of experience. You think Yao's missing that point-blank dunk was all mental? Answer this: would a 19-year old, fresh from high school, Amare Stoudamire have missed that dunk? No, because he's athletic enough to finish that in his sleep. Because of Yao's physical limits, he has to be extra attentive mentally to not look silly on plays like that. Will Yao ever reach that state where he has that level of mental readiness and attentiveness at all times? I think that would be expecting too much. He'll have games like this every now and then, and they will probably become more frequent as time passes and he loses what little explosiveness he has.

Shoot touch comes and goes. Shooting, game to game, is the least consistent attribute of a basketball player. Good athletes have other things to fall back on when the shot isn't falling.

Yao has been fairly consistent in terms of production for some time, because he takes a lot of shots at the basket. But the less he relies on layups/dunks and the more he relies on hooks and jumpers, the more inconsistent he'll be. And Yao is a guy who depends heavily on his teammates to create openings for himself at the basket. As T-Mac has declined as a playmaker attacking the basket, the less dunks/layups Yao has had. That's a major factor in his FG% decreasing, in my opinion.

 

Yao has physical limitations absolutely. On the other hand he has compensating strengths. To go along with his lack of quickness he was an overwhelming height advantage on just about everybody and a smooth shot. That height already affords him plenty of opportunities under the basket via second chance points when the other Rockets miss. He's never been a great rebounder for his size but his height advantage alone allows him to be effective. He does a fair imitation of the dream shake but he's never going to be as agile as Hakeem. Again though he's got a half a foot height advantage on Hakeem. That's not going to get away as he gets older, and the fact that his game doesn't depend on physicality now means that he's not going to be as handicapped as a Howard as he ages.

On the contrary, I would say that the missed dunk was all about mental uncertainty. Yao barely has to hop at all to dunk. It's like a normal person pulling stuff off the top of the fridge. The fact that he blew it looks to me like hesitation, problems with timing, etc. Even Amare can brick it point blank if he's timid.

If the question is about a guy's mental state then who knows? It's impossible to predict how people's personalities will change as they age.

Also, explosiveness and Yao? When exactly has he ever been explosive? "Explosiveness" is irrelevant to his game. I would say he has zero explosiveness right now, so he can't lose any. You seem to be stuck in the mindset that every center has to look like Howard or Shaq. On the other hand I remember back to Kareem.

Two words for your basketball education: sky hook.

Here's something else: Hakeem and his fadeaway.

 

Actually, if you watch that play again, Yao tried to dunk it left handed. He never does that. If he had any measure of athleticism/coordination in the air, it probably wouldn't have mattered. But he has very little of it, and he was trying to do something, in-game, that his body wasn't used to. Again, if he was extra sharp mentally on that particular play, he might have spent an extra-split second to gather himself more and dunk it more definitively. Most normally-sized players don't have to do that.

You don't believe that. If Yao had "zero" explosiveness, how much explosiveness did, say, Gheorge Muresan have? Did he have negative explosiveness? Yao has some athleticism. It's just very minimal. But it's enough for him to do certain things that no one at his size as ever been able to do. As I said, if he does end up losing what little he has, that can have dramatic consequences on his game. Right now Yao struggles to up and down the court and he has minimal mobility. But suppose he ran the court and had the mobility of Muresan. He wouldn't be anywhere close to the player he is now.

Kareem perfected his sky hook in college. He was a dominant player as soon as he entered the pros. He played well into the late stages of his career, but he certainly wasn't improving.

Hakeem's fadeaway was effective because of the distance he was able to create on the fade, and because he was so quick that he could get defenders to bite on a fake to the middle. Garnett has a similar fadeaway move, and he pulls it off because he has a similar body type / level of athleticism. I'm not sure why you keep wanting to compare Yao to Hakeem.

 

If the game were only about skill, Yao would destroy Howard. Can u imagine them playing a game of horse, Yao would win every time. And even though he is slower as hell, he still has better post moves and varieties than DHo. However, in today;s game with showing on pick n rolls, in contesting shots at the rim, Howard is way ahead. Its really not fair to Yao that he gets injured always, but thats the makeup of his body. Howard never gets injured and impacts the game much more so defensively than Yao. Dwight could be struggling to score, but he still can get u 20+ rebs and 5+ blocks, Yao can't really do that because of his lack of jumping ability. Clearly Howard is the better center

 

Oh yes I absolutely believe that. Explosiveness means being able to explode, and Yao simply does not do that. When have you ever seen him explode up through a group of guys under the basket to thrown down a slam dunk?

Yao is big and skilled, he's not explosive.

[QUOTE}Kareem perfected his sky hook in college. He was a dominant player as soon as he entered the pros. He played well into the late stages of his career, but he certainly wasn't improving.

Hakeem's fadeaway was effective because of the distance he was able to create on the fade, and because he was so quick that he could get defenders to bite on a fake to the middle. Garnett has a similar fadeaway move, and he pulls it off because he has a similar body type / level of athleticism. I'm not sure why you keep wanting to compare Yao to Hakeem.[/QUOTE]

You're missing the point. Go back and read my post. You seem to think that big centers are all about scoring in the paint via dunks. My guess is that's because you've only started watching basketball recently and came of age in the Shaq era.

The funny thing about Shaq though is that he's largely an aberration. If you tally up the list of the greatest centers ever you'll see that they'll largely made up of big men with legitimate skills. In other words, guys that could actually shoot. Kareem's sky hook, Hakeem's fadeaway--those are midrange shots which depend on skill and shooting ability, two qualities you seemed to dismiss in your last post. Kareem and to a lesser extent Hakeem thrived not by dunking the ball over and over (the Dream when he was young said he liked to "dunk and dunk and dunk", but as he got older what put his game over the top was his fadeaway) but with their shooting touch. Sound familiar?

Kareem btw played until he was almost 40. My all-time favorite center, incidentally.

 

Read the context of my initial statement. When I said "what little explosiveness he has", I'm talking about his ability to get his 300-lb frame off the ground for a dunk relatively quickly. Zero "explosiveness", in that sense, means he has literally zero agility at the rim. If that was the case, he wouldn't be able to dunk at all, and he would miss a lot more shots around the rim than he does currently. He'd get blocked even more often. It would be more difficult for him to get off a jump hook in the lane without it getting swatted. There would be a difference.

I'm not dismissing "skill" and "shooting ability". Even though you quoted it, you apparently didn't grasp what I was saying:

[rquoter]
Kareem perfected his sky hook in college. He was a dominant player as soon as he entered the pros. He played well into the late stages of his career, but he certainly wasn't improving.

Hakeem's fadeaway was effective because of the distance he was able to create on the fade, and because he was so quick that he could get defenders to bite on a fake to the middle. Garnett has a similar fadeaway move, and he pulls it off because he has a similar body type / level of athleticism. I'm not sure why you keep wanting to compare Yao to Hakeem.
[/rquoter]

You bring up Kareem's sky hook to show that Yao can still improve his offensive game by adding a finesse move. My point is that Kareem didn't add a sky hook to his repertoire mid-career. He had it in college. He dominated the league with it as soon as he entered the pro ranks. That's a move he perfected as a young player. Can Yao add that to his game at this stage of his career? Highly unlikely. For starters, he doesn't have the right frame to pull it off. Kareem was lanky, and relatively light weight for his height. It didn't take much physically effort for him to jump off one leg and extend. That would be much more difficult for Yao. The guy has enough foot problems as is. You don't want him jumping up on one leg like that at this stage.

And I made my comments about Hakeem's fadeaway as clear as I could. Again, no clue how you read into it that I was dismissing the importance of skill. My point was that Hakeem's success with his fadeaway was contingent on his ability to create separation from the defender (that requires a certain amount of athleticism) and his ability to fake the middle and turn baseline in a fluid motion. Yao has a fine turnaround, as is. But it will never be like Hakeem's, because Yao doesn't have the physical tools to pull that off.

None of the above is me saying that Yao won't be good because he doesn't play like Howard or Shaq. If Yao was normally proportioned and he had average athleticism across the board, there would be more scope for him to improve. But his great size, with all the deficiencies that entails, does him more harm than good in the long term.

 

badgerfan, name a player who is even remotely comparable to Yao physically that improved into his 30s. Stop with the Hakeem comparisons, for God's sake.

 

i wonder if we can trade yao plus tmac for DH kek. imo DH+ron>Yao+tmac, im pretty sure we can pass 2nd rd with this combo.

 

Posts like this serve no purpose but to confirm my belief that you are just trolling here. Crawl back to your hole before it gets dark, troll.

 

lies.

 

badgerfan,

OK, I think I understand the disagreement here. I need to be more clear. Non-athletic skills are important for an aging player to improve. I don't dispute that. What I'm saying is that those skills are not enough. You need to have certain physical abilities to take advantage of those skills as well.

There are no historical examples, that I'm aware of, of a center in his late 20s to early 30s becoming a more dominant low post threat who wasn't already equipped with at least average athleticism. Skill without physical ability doesn't get you anywhere. Here's a simple example with Yao: The guy is a great shooter. He shoots 85% from the stripe. He could probably rain in 20 foot set shots all day in practice. How's his face up midrange game in actual games? Virtually non-existent. And it will stay that way, because he doesn't have the right body type to put the ball on the floor if his shot is taken away from him. And he has a slow release, which means if he wants to be accurate with it he needs a lot of time -- time that defenses won't usually give him.

You talk of hooks and fadeaways. Yao is already very accurate on those shots. He's not going to get much more effective on them, unless he magically gains more explosiveness so he can jump higher on the hook or fade deeper on the turnaround. I just don't see that happening. 3 years ago, maybe it would make sense to talk about that. Now, not so much.

 

Howard started out worse tonight than Yao did against the Celtics.

After 1 quarter:

1:24 MIN
2 PFs
0 PTS (0-1 FG)
0 REB
0 AST
0 BLK

 

i blame the ref...
1st min 2 pfs,LAWL

 

pretty good discussions here b/w durvasa and badgerfan. me like it, though i don't necessarily agree or disagree. i'd like to see more posts like these (with meat) on this board.

one thing though. there has never been any appropriate and comparable specimen of yao in basket history, in terms of the combination of hight, skill and athleticism (or the lack thereof). we might very well have to draw conclusions when his career is over or nearly over.

 

thats one of the most delusional piece of ****s ive ever read

 

final stats:
MIN FGM-A FTM-A OREB DREB REB AST STL BLK TO PF PTS
29 6-11 2-8 5 3 8 2 0 3 2 4 14

even with pf problems, DH still doin good after all with 5 offrebound 3 blks, as i said the only thing DH behind yao is teh free throw lol.
whos the best center now?

 

In fantasy sports, Yao.
In team record, Yao.
In team defense, Yao.
In head-to-head matchups-Yao.
In skill level-Yao
In being an important symbol of the NBA (humanitarian and all that)-Yao

...I think Yao wins. :/

 

You hit the nail on the head. Yao is pretty much in or past his prime (depending if his history of foot injuries) continues. He can't possibly get any better as all of the things that require skill (shooting, reasonably ambidexterous) etc he has already mastered.

Yao is only going to become more of a liability as he loses what little foot speed and lateral quickness that he has..

Dwight most likely will never develop the back to the basket game and the touch that all the best big men have.

Like it or not , these two are a far cry from the great centres of the 90s... Similar to Zo and Ewing and not even close to the greats - Dream, Shaq, D.Rob

 

agreed,but DHs still young. btw D.rob sux, dont put him with dream and shaq kek.