Thursday night Yao Ming and many of the players who will be playing in Saturday’s charity game gathered at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Beijing for a press conference.

What’s impressive was that the players had just arrived from an 11-hour flight from Seattle (add on a few more hours for each of them to get to Seattle from their home city), checked into their hotel, and immediately went to the press conference where each one said a few words about how they were looking forward to helping Yao’s foundation through the charity games they will be playing.

Having made a similar flight myself to be in Beijing for this weekend’s events, I can tell you that’s no easy feat. They must have been really tired to do all of that in 24 hours. You could tell that Yao was very appreciative for the players to give their time and energy to such a worthy cause, and will continue to show his appreciation over the coming week.

Yao greets each player individually at the press conference for his Charity game and gala.

Also incredible was the number of media at the presser. I counted at least 15 video camera crews, and there were probably a couple dozen still photographers, and maybe 100 media members overall. This is probably about 4 or 5 times the number you would see in Houston for a similar press conference.

Click here for more photos from the press conference, which include pics of Brandon Jennings, Amir Johnson, Hasheem Thabeet, Baron Davis, Chase Budinger, and Dajuan Summers. Also in attendance were Chinese National team members Liu Wei, Ding Jinhui, and coach Bob Donewald, Jr. Steve Nash is expected to arrive today (Friday).

This morning many of the players will be heading to the stadium for a workout, and tonight is the charity gala dinner at the hotel. Tomorrow night is the game itself, then head to Taipei, Taiwan early next week for another game.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 8:06 am and is filed under China, Rockets' off-season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.