More Asian Americans on the rise in college ball

Permalink of this article

There are maybe three or four "franchises" in the history of organized Asian American basketball leagues in the USA: (1) the Japanese-centric Nippon Athletic Union of Northern and Southern California, borne out of the Japanese internment camps of World War II, (2) the Chinese National Tournament borne out of the East Coast, (3) the IndoPak tournament circuit, and (4) the East and West Coast Filipino leagues started by immigrants to large metros.

Guess what, perhaps Asian American basketball's greatest player ever has returned home. Rex Walters was named the head coach of USF yesterday (Rex is 50% Japanese, 50% Caucasian).

This is a little eerie because I was gonna post our NYC commish's recent article on some ballers of our Asian league/tourney circuits of today -- from the potential of Xiro Navaulath, to the token-Asian-guy-at-a-world-class-program Matt Lee, and the steady starter of a small D-1 Jeremy Lin, who actually has not appeared in an Asian league/tourney yet (...and props to Ryan Reyes, although we are talking about D-1 here, not pro) -- who have made it to the D-1 level.

And just last week I also recently came close to hiring a new ref in our Bay Area league, Joe Belfry (he called me back too late, but you'll see him soon in stripes on our courts), former teammate of John Tofi. Tofi started at UTEP and is now, according to Belfry, playing professionally in Italy.

Here's the report from NYC... Read the rest of the story

__________

Asian Heritage Street Celebration

Permalink of this article

If you're in the Bay Area, join us this Saturday, May 19 from 10am onwards at the Asian Heritage Street Celebration.

Dreamleague will have its own booth (donated by AsianWeek) where you can shoot mini-hoops and win what will probably be coveted bottles of Gatorade, if the weather is nice and hot.

In case you're wondering, we're there to not only spice up the day -- how can you go wrong with shooting hoops? -- but also to promote our Beijing 2008 Olympics tour package, which will have free tickets to Team USA+China, among other things. More details on Beijing coming soon!

__________

Watch racial stereotypes run rampant when Yi Jianlian gets drafted

I guess I'm kind of glad this happened, even though it knocked out a whole day's list of other to-do's. This stuff opens your eyes. It makes you wiser, stronger, more appreciative of each person's individuality. I'm glad I spent a whole day thinking about it.

Today, our otherwise-revered TrueHoop, written by Henry Abbott, made the following bullet-point post:

• Footage of Yi Jianlian making a bunch of dunks that look to me like they would likely be blocked, or stolen on the way up, in the NBA.

For the 100+ teams and players of those teams currently playing in our SF Bay Area and New York Asian American leagues, you know the feeling already.

It's kind of like the hoops blogger (Bill Simmons? Chad Ford? Henry Abbott himself? Honestly, I can't remember where I read it) who said in response to the major uproar following the Vegas All-Star Weekend in which arrests and violence were referenced strongly with the African American and hip-hop community:

[Reminder: I'm paraphrasing by memory here.] "I couldn't tell you if an African American, with corn rows and baggy pants, approaching me on the street is really a gangsta or a student at UPenn..."

Read the rest of the story

UPDATED: See comments
__________

One On One With Jeremy Lin

[From dreamleague NYC commish Brian Yang]

This Saturday, right here in New York City, a historical event is set to take place. Where will you be? All kinds of history is made in the Big Apple, but there has never been history of this kind. On Saturday at 7pm, at the Levien Gym on West 119th and Broadway, the Harvard Crimson will tip off against the Columbia Lions and the game will be the first time NYC (and possibly the 2nd time ever in the United States) sees two players of Asian descent square off against one another in a Division 1 college game.

KJ Matsui of Columbia and Jeremy Lin of Harvard will meet again for the second time in both team’s season finale. The first time they met? When these two faced each other earlier this season up in Cambridge (a Columbia 90-70 win). It was historic then too. But this is NYC folks, they’re on the main stage now.

Read the rest of the story

UPDATED: See comments (scroll down)

__________

Adversity, not fundamentals

In this week's ESPN The Mag, Oakley Brooks uncovered a little tidbit about a certain group of 37 teenagers (5 of them over 7-feet, including Yi Jianlian) from China, spotted at a Rockets-Blazers game and currently training at the U.S. Basketball Academy in Oregon:

"From a skills perspective, they don't have to apologize to anyone," says Cameron Hill, a former assistant at Kentucky who's overseeing the Chinese ballers' six-month stay...Still, [they] lack fundamentals, particularly when it comes to lifting weights and running a standard half-court spread. That's why Chinese officials sent their best to the West.

I humbly submit that the missing ingredient is not the fundamentals as described. It is good old-fashioned adversity.

The mental aspect of the game is very complex, but it all starts with adversity, overcoming a challenge that you as a balla take personally. In the NBA, sometimes it's the difficulties of growing up in the inner-city that propels one's desire to succeed. Everyone has to find their own fuel, not matter what level you're at.

For me, it was simply being demoted from starting floor general to 3rd-string point guard in 9th grade -- this was before I sprouted 9 inches to 5'11" one year later -- after being yelled at as an idiot in front of the entire gym by my coach in preseason for forgetting the defensive switch from zone to man, crushing my confidence for years. I then slowly climbed my way back to starting small forward as a senior. With local playground ball still part of my staple, even as I left town for college I still vowed to become better than any of the starters that had been ahead of me or go-to guys throughout all those years, just in case I ever saw one of my old alums on the blacktop.

In the game of basketball, everyone has to find their own fuel. I'm not sure the Chinese basketball academies realize that.

On a side note, here's the illustration from Frank Stockton that accompanied the article. It's not particularly helpful in breaking down the stereotypes of Chinese/Asian ballas: http://www.frankstockton.com/espn.html

__________

I dunno, Colangelo, I just don't know

Jemele Hill of ESPN Page 2 just interviewed Jerry Colangelo. Here's some bread-and-butter of what he said about Team USA:

"When that game ended against Greece, in the locker room, I know how they all felt. We don't ever want to feel that way again as long as we're together. I think that's going to bond us even more...It had nothing to do with the player-personnel (or)...having the right talent. We did a poor job in preparation in defending the pick-and-roll against Greece. It's as simple as that. And a team beat us that shouldn't have. They deserved to win because we didn't get the job done. If we played them 10 times, we'd win nine out of 10."

Sounds a lot like our Dream League All-Star squad, which coming off a heartbreaking championship loss to the L.A. Tigers Blue in 2005, went down to Vegas for the 14th Annual LVI this past September 2006 and promptly got slapped in the face by Arizona Desert Jade. Two consecutive weeks of open gym run/practice (heh, it'd be a crime to call them practices!) for our guys leading up to the tournament proved to be a non-factor.

Read the rest of the story

__________

Texas Western (Extra)-Lite

[Thanks to Briflys for this...]

Excerpted from yesterday's San Jose Mercury in an article by David Kiefer:

On the wall above the main entrance is a mural, maybe 25 years old judging from the short shorts, of a long-haired blond boy competing in uniforms of various Matadors sports teams.

But the Monta Vista team that took the floor looked nothing like the caricature on the wall. In fact, Monta Vista is a rarity in boys high school basketball, a team with an all-Asian-American starting lineup.

Read the rest of the story

__________

LeBron's global strategy now hinges on playing 1-on-1 with Chinese kid (from Chicago?!)

Our beloved beacon of basketball brouhaha, TrueHoop.com, reported earlier on Tuesday in a line item that LeBron James just "announced" a promotional deal with Microsoft, so I had no choice but to drop everything and embark on a writeup which I was hoping could wait until the holidays.

I put "announced" in quotation marks because this is actually pretty old news. Microsoft has sponsored LBJ's Bike-A-Thon in the past and there's even an insightful transcription (scroll to the middle of the page) of LeBron's budding relationship with Microsoft, through a dialogue between Maverick Carter and a Microsoft executive at an advertising conference not too long ago in late September.

In fact, as you might remember from our dreamleague-wide posts (before we had this blog) on Nov. 27 entitled Chinese Youth with Skillz for LeBron Commercial (scroll almost all the way down), LeBron has been scouring the country for a male Chinese kid age 10-14 with good basketball skills to go one-on-one in his forthcoming commercial with Microsoft...

Read the rest of the story (UPDATED 1/15/2007)

__________