Signing him to a reasonable contract won't be the problem, depending on him to stay healthy is the real issue.. I want no part of Yao past this season, even at a league minimum, he would be a risk because your actually depending on him to stay healthy and that is something he hasn't done in a VERY long time.
Yao might sign for the minimum as a gesture of gratitude for the team sticking with him through it all, and to put us in a better cap position. That's the kind of person he is.
Yao has been out for 2+weeks with an ankle sprain. Not even major but he's been out for 2 weeks. Unless your name is KAAAAHN, no GM that want's to keep his job is going to spend more than the MLE for Yao and that's about $7 million. Hell, Even that would be stupid because of the amount of years. Yao is done as a full time player IMHO.
And you know this because.........your a GM???? You do know we signed Brad Miller to a $5 million dollar contact to play 20 minutes a game with ZERO shot blocking skills and really bad defense...who can't start over Chuck Hayes.....Brad Miller is already on the 24 minutes no B2B plan. Who you going to trade Yao for???????O wait, nobody wants him. So let him play his contract out.
I'm not for trading him. Who would want him? It would have to be for some contender desperate for a Center. His contract will likely just run out but I do think that someone might ask about him if we are out of the race and they are desperately needing a Center....Miami?
I think most teams without a really good center will ask for his 24 minutes...especially Miami..... I am already set for disappointment because i know we are stuck with him until he asks for a trade (i don't think he will ask) or he suffers a career injury. I can only pray he plays like 80% of his skillset......
This is ridiculous. NBA is essentially a business. What Yao did for this organization well deserves his salary. No one will say no to the money. Yao will stay this season. Next season? This is totally dependent how much Rockets would like to offer Yao and how much the other teams want to offer. Of course, if Yao cannot stay healthy then, probably no team want to offer him a contract and he will have to retire.
According to JF's blog at chron.com, Chinese business, including American companies advertising in China, makes up roughly 5% of the Rocket's sponsorship revenues. I wasn't able to find the comments that he responded to regarding this in his blogs, and I wasn't able to locate the article he wrote specifically about this during my very brief search moments ago. But if you look deep enough, you'll find it from about 2 months ago. That's it. That's the cash cow everyone's been talking about Yao being to the Rockets. What I don't know is how much money the Rockets make in sponsorship deals (advertisers). But 5% of it is the only added monetary bonus the Rockets get from having Yao on their roster. The rest is shared by the league.
I found a link to the comments I was referring to earlier. http://blogs.chron.com/nba/2010/11/another_rockets_loss_and_the_p.html Search for "revenue". You'll quickly see where I got these numbers from. Unfortunately, I still don't know what their total sponsorship revenues were. Forbes had their total Revenue at around $146 million in 2006, but that included all income except gate ticket sales, I believe. So their sponsor revenues are probably significantly lower than that. Let's assume a very rough (and probably very wrong) estimate is 50% of their revenues from 2006 were coming from advertisers. That's $73 million in ad money. 5% of that, or $3.65 million, would be all that Yao generates the Rockets for having him on their team. That's a lot of money for you and me, but relatively speaking, it's a drop in the bucket. Based on this, would you really call Yao a cash cow for the Houston Rockets?
Adding to your point, from Feigen's blog a few games ago... http://blogs.chron.com/nba/2010/11/another_rockets_loss_and_the_p.html
Thanks for quoting those comments for me. It seems like this whole 'revenue generating cash cow'-that-is-Yao-Ming-thing has gotten way out of hand. If we decide to retain Yao in the off-season, it's because of what he can do on the basketball court, not because of any amount of additional revenue that he's magically generating just because he's from China. And if another team were to agree to trade for Yao and to pay his $17+ million salary, then this magical $3.65 million revenue stream (even if it were to directly transfer to the new team) would be way short of paying for a player that may not even be on the court. It isn't until Yao accepts under $10 million in salary a year (and plays at least like he's worth 2/3 of that) that this extra revenue might even come close to factoring in the decision whether to sign him or not. You sign Yao to a contract because he's a dominant center, if healthy. That's a huge 'if' these days.
