Fists of Fury: Yi-Watch 2007

As a blog that claims to be about basketball from an Asian American perspective, we've been sorely lacking coverage on Chinese forward Yi Jianlian. Why is not important, we've posted on him before. I supposed we're taking a wait and see attitude before we start calling Yi the next... Toni Kukoc (a far cry from the "next KG" he used to get). But that's still no excuse for our lack of coverage.

So, we begin Yi-Watch 2007.

AOL Sports scooped what looks like a cell-phone mini-clip of Rudy Gay "welcoming" Yi to the NBA, but it's widely available now via YouTube.


It's pretty impressive and it's true they didn't show Yi's less impressive dunk over Gay, but the Grizzlies won... against the Chinese National Team. The Chinese Nats can't beat the Memphis Grizzlies... summer league team. Granted, no Yao Ming, but it was the summer league team... that's just terrible. So Yi was welcomed, or did he welcome himself, I guess it depends on how you look at it.

And then Yesterday, the Kings summer league team beats the Chinese Nats 73-47 and Kings rookie center Spencer Hawes dropped 19 pts, 7 boards. Terrible.

Finally, though, Yi has begun talks with Milwaukee. We knew he couldn't pull the Steve Francis for that long. It takes a special kind of personality to pull that off. And now, Milwaukee's bringing in the big guns... or a gun named Stern.