With Yao Ming retired, what?s next for Chinese basketball?

Posted on | Wednesday, July 27, 2011 | No Comments

The head coach of China's national basketball team is exasperated, and for good reason. "What's amazing is that in a country of 1.3 billion," he recently told the New York Times, "I can't find a point guard."

This is one of the tougher realizations in a fascinating New York Times piece by Dan Levin. In it, Levin references the inefficient Chinese system that plucks taller-than-average youths from their regular schools at a young age, demanding that the chosen children work at a "sports school" that is heavy on basketball drills but short on promises. Just because you're tall, it doesn't mean you're any good; and yet that doesn't stop the plucking.

And for a national team that is constantly done in by the failings of its backcourt, the recognition process still has a long way to go. Because someone who will eventually end up the same height as a typical point guard, from any country, won't be (literally) head and shoulders above his classmates at an early age. As Levin points out, there's no way of determining the Chinese version of Allen Iverson or Derrick Rose simply by looking at their height at age 10.

On top of that, the same rigid structure that helped the recently retired Yao Ming become the fundamental monster that he became could have also hastened his demise. Endless drills and practice, combined with unceasing international play for his home country put unwelcome stress on Yao's already taxed feet. The result was an average of 41 games missed per season from Yao between 2005 and 2011, after missing just two games combined over his first three seasons.

With his retirement, and Yi Jianlian's washout as an NBA player, the cupboard is looking pretty bare. Bad news for a basketball-crazy country that, as Bob Donewald Jr. (the country's American-born national coach) noted in the quote from earlier in this post, is severely lacking in both star-power, or even on-court competence.

With that in place, you get the feeling that the country will take the tradeoff. Beat in basketball, no doubt, but more than capable in areas that actually count.

From Levin's piece:

Despite a generation of men who grew up with Yao and the N.B.A. and who play informally in cities and towns across the country, they are never fully developed. Furthermore, the disconnect between China's state-run athletic schools and its general educational institutions prevents older children not recruited into the system from getting an opportunity to play.

Those who do play on public courts are in their 20s or older, Donewald said, reflecting Chinese society's traditionally single-minded focus on education. That means most children spend their days and nights studying for tests, not playing pick-up games in the park or practicing in after-school programs.

So, perhaps the search for a point guard has taken a rightful backseat.

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