Another busy day in Beijing on Friday. In the morning the NBA players on tour here (Chase Budinger, Baron Davis, Amir Johnson, Dajuan Summers, Brandon Jennings, Hasheem Thabeet) took a bus to a nearby gym to practice for Saturday’s charity game being held for Yao Ming’s Foundation.

Surprisingly, the players didn’t mail it in. They went through several intensive drills, worked up a nice sweat, then followed it up with a full-court practice game [I’ve got video that I’ll be posting later].

Talking to Bill Duffy, the agent who represents all of the players participating in Yao’s Foundation Tour, these players came to China not only to help Yao with his Foundation, but also to keep their conditioning up during the off-season to raise their intensity level with other NBA players with them. And since these charity games are NBA-sanctioned, if they were to suffer an injury, they don’t have to worry contract-wise above and beyond if they were injured in an NBA game. So they worked hard and are taking a lot of pride into their game against the Chinese National Team on Saturday night.

Hasheem Thabeet, Chase Budinger, and the other NBA players go through dribbling drills.

Baron Davis and Hasheem Thabeet stretch during their workout.

One funny episode occurred when a few teenage boys who happened to be playing in a nearby facility wanted to get inside the gym so they could watch the NBA players working out. Graciously, they were allowed in to watch from the bleachers. It turned out that when the players were going to practice playing 5-on-5, they were short a couple of players, so the boys were invited on to the court to fill-in! They were reluctant at first, but after lots of encouragement, they ultimately came on to the court since they realized this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to play against NBA competition!

You couldn’t wipe the smiles these boys had on their faces the entire time they were on the court. At one point one of the boys got the ball on an open fast break, looked great taking it to the basket, but he blew the open layup! Everyone laughed, including the boy, since he caved under the pressure of scoring his first basket against NBA players!

Another time, there was a lot of playful banter that one of the boys traveled after scoring a basket, but Baron Davis came to his defense since the boy was on his team! The whole gym cracked up as Baron continued to loudly make his case for the boy throughout the next possession!

All in all, the teenagers had a lot of fun and still had the smiles on their faces after the practice ended.

More activities occurred the rest of the day involving Yao, which I’ll get to in my next post in a few hours. There is so much happening here in Beijing, it’s hard to keep up!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 24th, 2010 at 8:23 am and is filed under China, Rockets' off-season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.