Not much gained for Yi playing with Team China

Permalink of this article

There's nothing like studying top draft picks in decent competition from the 2nd row at midcourt. You just can't witness naunces from a TV screen -- or worse, a laptop monitor -- like you can this close to the players. I went to Vegas last week to catch two games live of Yi Jianlian and the Chinese National Team. ESPN.com's Chad Ford had Yi ranked right behind Greg Oden and Kevin Durant for the 2007 NBA Draft, and Yi looked pretty good as a mobile 7-footer with skills in pre-draft workouts.

After watching a multitude of various summer league 7-footers, of which Spencer Hawes was probably the most skilled, you could see from the ESPN pre-draft workout clip that Yi really does have a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the Chinese National Team is doing almost nothing to tap that potential...

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!

__________

Behind the scenes at Vegas All-Star

Hottest tickets in town, Celine Dion be damned. (All photos courtesy of D. Ho.)

[From Seoul Shibuya...]

On my way back from Cali, I swung over in LV and caught up with our very own Danny Ho, Moe’s Tavern power forward and employee of the National Basketball Association, and got to ask him what it’s like being him. Over 10 plates of food at the Wynn buffet, here’s how it went...

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)

__________