Tuesday night Yao Ming had an interesting game in the Rockets first preseason game, dishing out 3 assists Vlade Divac style. He also hit 4-of-11 shots (most from the outside) and scored 13 points in 17 minutes of play. Here he goes up strong over New Orleans’ Hilton Armstrong…

I wasn’t able to see the game, which the Rockets lost after holding a 30-9 lead. But most of that lead was given up in the second half long after Yao and Tracy McGrady were gone.

Click here for the boxscore, and here for more photos from the game.

Today was the final day in Austin for the Rockets. It was a long week and I think everybody was ready to go home. Here Yao Ming and Steve Francis are seen immediately after practice…

I was able to cap off the last 3 days with some more recorded interviews (recordings are in embedded players below).

Yao was very accommodating and let me ask more questions than I thought he would be able to give. I had to share the time with other reporters, so I wasn’t able to ask him everything I would have liked, but it was the most amount of time he had ever been able to give to me. So I really can’t complain.

In the part 1 of the interview right here…

…Yao talks about the following (among other topics):

– How his time in the low-post the past few years used to be 90% compared to 10% on the perimeter, the past few days in Austin it has been 65% in the low post, and 35% on the perimeter.

– Yao gets in the low-post different with Adelman’s offense than he did with Jeff Van Gundy’s offense. He’s not just “waiting there.”

– Dikembe Mutombo has given him a lot of pounding the past few days.

– New backup center Jackie Butler is very strong. You have to pay attention to him, especially when the ball is in the air because he is very active.

– Dikembe is in better shape than last year (he’s much stronger). Deke “gets everybody every day” with his elbows.

– Carroll Dawson went over to China during the summer to help Yao train, and he was appreciative that he went all the way over to China to help him.

– One of the funny things that happened during the interview is when I asked him about his free throw shooting percentage. I asked him that since he’s an 80% free throw shooter (he’s 82.2% for his NBA career), if it was going to be easier for him to score since he’s going to be spending more time at the elbow of the lane. Yao made sure to let me know his free throw percentage the past couple of years was higher, then he responded accordingly.

– With the new offense Adelman is putting into place, I brought up comparisons to Yao’s game with Arvydas Sabonis, Yao’s childhood idol.

– I asked him if Rick Adelman’s seemigly positive nature makes a difference to the team compared to Jeff Van Gundy’s demeanor?

Here’s the second part of the interview…

…where Yao addresses…

– No big guy likes to run like Adelman wants him to run, but he knows he has to do it.

– He doesn’t want to say this is the best team the Rockets have ever had because they say that every year!

– …my question if he has changed any part of his game to prevent injury?

– …if he has kept in touch with Colin Pine, his former translator who he used the first couple of years of his NBA career.

Directly below is an interview with Rick Adelman, with the first couple of questions asked by the Houston Chronicle’s Jonathan Feigen (who is a fantastic reporter and great guy, by the way), then ESPN’s Marc Stein, then the Yao question asked by yours truly where Adelman beams about Yao. Then Feigen and Stein ask questions again, plus a CCTV reporter.

Directly below is an interview of Tracy McGrady, provided to me by the nice folks who work for CCTV in China. I missed this interview, but they were kind of enough to let me have a copy of it. McGrady speaks fairly soft, so you might need to crank up the volume on your machine to hear him.

Finally, click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for some more audio the CCTV guys let me copy, this one of Steve Francis and Shane Battier.

There is some background noise that arises in the middle of the interview which makes it difficult to hear, though…

Read the rest of this entry »

I went to Saturday’s media session after the Rockets practice, and there was considerably less media from Houston there because many went back to Houston for the weekend. You could tell many of the players were very tired. Evidently coach Rick Adelman had them do much more running in Saturday’s practice than previous practices.

After the practice many of the players were drinking cups of Jamba Juice to refresh themselves, as you see in the first picture above. It was Rafer Alston who joked after the practice that Jamba Juice was really going to miss the Rockets after they left town because all the business they had been giving them this week in Austin.

I was able to get some good interviews, which are available below.

Here’s the one with Yao, where you can tell he was fatigued from the practice…

Here’s the tail-end of an interview that Rick Adelman was giving…

I had a good conversation with Kirk Snyder in which I started off asking him about Yao’s alleged disappointment that he wasn’t able to play in the Utah playoff series loss last year. The interview comes in two parts…

I plan to go to the final media session on Sunday, and I’m hoping I will get some time to ask Yao all the questions I have for him, but the media sessions tend to be shorter than expected since alot of players go to the bus early, which puts alot of pressure on them to wrap things up quickly.

I just got back from Friday’s practice. The interview sessions were short, but I was able to get the tail end of Rick Adelman‘s interview, as well as Yao Ming‘s first session with the Rockets media.

Here are some of the audio clips.

Rick Adelman – was very impressed with Yao in his first practice

Yao Ming – He was very funny, like with his responses to questions about married life, as well as “Steve.” Even while suffering from a cold and understandably tired from all the travel he went through to get to Austin, I was pleasantly surprised how upbeat and humorous he was with the media.

Click here for a couple of more photos I took of Yao on Friday.

Yao arrived in Austin late Thursday afternoon, 3 days late due to his commitment to the Special Olympics in China. Jet-lagged from his flight from Shanghai, suffering a cold, and having just driven to Austin from Houston, Yao insisted on getting to work one hour after arriving in town…even though the coaches said he could have the night off. Wow. That’s dedication.

You can read all about Yao’s return to the Rockets in this Houston Chronicle article.

I’m sure Yao will be exhausted, but happy and excited to be back with all the new talent around him, and the new offense that should be an interesting challenge for him to learn. I’ll be at camp on Friday and will share my thoughts, as I’m sure everyone else reporting on the Rockets will. Yao’s return will no doubt be the most talked-about event at Cooley Pavilion on Friday.

I was able to go to Day 3 of the Rockets training camp in Austin. This was my first day to attend since I had been out of town the past 1 1/2 days, and Yao Ming isn’t scheduled to arrive until Friday anyway. The Rockets will be in Austin through Sunday, which is one day longer than last year, so that gives me 3 more days to check things out.

Since I was able to go to a couple of days of camp last year, and it’s being held in the same fantastic facility on the University of Texas campus, it was much easier this time around since I was familiar with everything.

Unlike last year under the helm of former coach Jeff Van Gundy, new head coach Rick Adelman doesn’t have a problem with opening up the last 10-15 minutes of practice to the media. When the media was allowed to enter, I was surprised to see former GM Carroll Dawson on the sidelines. I guess it’s hard for him to pull himself away after serving the Rockets for so long. I don’t blame him.

The players were scrimmaging fairly hard, but several players like Tracy McGrady, Chuck Hayes, Dikembe Mutombo, and Bonzi Wells were resting on the sidelines (later the media learned that Bonzi did get some action on the court).

You could tell the players who were on the sidelines had worked hard by how fatigued they looked. Hayes had one of his socks off, and it looked like he was nursing his ankle. GM Daryl Morey went over to him to see how he was feeling. It didn’t appear serious.

Click here for more photos from Thursday’s training camp activities.

I didn’t get to see much since we saw the tail end of the scimmage, except new power forward Luis Scola did draw a charge.

Soon the practice ended with a team huddle on the court, with Adelmen in the center of it for a few minutes. Then all the players spent several minutes on the court stretching, with strength and conditioning coach David Macha in the middle conducting the various stretching routines.

While the players stretched, I had some time to talk to new VP of Basketball Operations Sam Hinkie. Hinkie, who was an assistant to Daryl Morey last year, took over for Dennis Lindsey who accepted a front office job with the Spurs this summer.

Hinkie was a great interview. I asked how the team was getting along without Yao in camp, and he said the offense has really been missing Yao in their drills. He said the players that are present are surprisingly getting up-to-speed fairly quick with the offense, so not having Yao there makes it hard for the offense to get to the next level since the offense is still going to revolve around him. For example, he said it’s difficult right now for the cutters entering the lane to get a feeling for how much room Yao takes up, which is an important adjustment they will need to make.

I asked Hinkie just how much they think Yao will be playing in the high post, and he said it will be frequent when the offense starts a possession, but if a shot attempt hasn’t happened early in the possession, then Yao will slide down in a low-post position to be a higher percentage shooting option. Of course, many wrinkles to this approach will evolve so it won’t become too predictable for opposing teams to defend.

I also asked him about Yao’s monetary fine for being late to camp because of his Special Olympics commitment, and asked if the Rockets would donate that money to the Special Olympics organization. He said he didn’t know where the fine dollars go, and that it may be something the league decides, and that I would have to check with the league to see how they collect that money and where it goes. But he believes most fines the NBA collects go to charity anyway.

After I spoke with Hinkie, I was able to get 3 interviews recorded, and have embedded links to all of them in the little players below.

Here’s the tail-end of a media interview with Adelman I recorded where he talks about his plans for Yao, what has been done this summer with him, the progress of Luther Head, the impact he thinks Bonzi is going to have on the offense, impressions of Mike Harris, and much, much more…

Read the rest of this entry »

Our Raymond did an awesome job in the YaoMania! forum capturing all the activities from Yao’s participation in the Special Olympics. Here Yao Ming enters the stadium during the Opening Ceremonies in Shanghai…

Yao was joined in the ceremony by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose mother-in-law Eunice helped start the Special Olympics movement.

There are just too many photos to show on this page, so I’ll refer you to the following links.

Link 1 – Check out the gradiose stadium and pageantry of the ceremony — I can only imagine what the real Olympic Opening Ceremonies are going to be like next year in Beijing.

Link 2 – Includes an article about the ceremonies, more pics, and quotes from Yao on how important the Special Olympics is to him after he received a high award.

Link 3 – Yao at the airport headed to Texas, and saying goodbye to Jackie Chan in some very funny poses.

With that, Yao is now finished with his Chinese commitments for awhile, and is headed to Austin to join his Rocket teammates for training camp.

Just like last year, there’s a good chance I’ll get to spend some time with Yao later this week when he arrives in Austin for training camp. You never know…plans could change, but I’m confident it will happen.

I’ve got several questions I’m going to ask him, but I thought I’d get your input on the type of questions YOU would like for me to ask. I’ll report here later in the week what he says.

Feel free to post your questions by using the comments link directly below. I’ll approve them throughout the day on Monday, and sporadically through Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m thinking I’ll get to talk to him on Thursday or Friday sometime.

I found an interesting mp3 and video on the Net today from Rockets Media Day.

First, here’s an mp3 of an interview with Bonzi Wells. From the sounds of the interviewer’s shocked response, it looks like Bonzi has ripped himself into shape. Here’s a photo of how he looks…

Impressive. Looks like a totally different guy. I can’t wait to see him play being so much lighter.

Through this interview, I also sensed a much better attitude in his voice compared to how gruff he was last year. I speculate his agent must have given him lots of advice to go out of his way to be nice with the media this year since it can only help in a contract year. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Second, here’s a video from the local Houston news station about Media Day, with special attention paid to Rafer Alston:

Today Dikembe Mutombo signed a one-year contract with the Rockets, which will be his last season in the NBA. After former Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy inexplicably only played Dikembe 40 minutes in that 7-game playoff series against the Jazz last season, Dikembe’s return was in serious doubt.

But thanks to Rocket legend Hakeem Olajuwon, he was able to convince Dikembe to come back after a 3-hour conversation.

We all know how well Dikembe filled in for Yao when Yao hurt his leg and missed 33 games last season.

You can read all the details in this ESPN piece, as well as read about how Rafer Alston may not be as guilty as we first thought.