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.