Our Raymond has done an awesome job translating an interview that Titan Sports did with Yao Ming yesterday. Yao still doesn’t feel comfortable with the new offense yet. Click here for the translation.

Similarly, the Houston Chronicle’s Jonathan Feigen wrote a similar piece (but shorter) in his Saturday column.

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 Nefei, Anhui on Thursday to practice for the Chinese National Team’s game against the Sydney Kings on Friday.

Click here for photos taken from the practice.

On another note, our Raymond spent 3 hours translating an interview that Yao Ming gave in China. In the interview, he talks about…

– the Mid Autumn Festival occurring in China
– the controversy about him rejoining the national team late to plan his wedding and honeymoon
– the excessively long training of the Chinese National Team
– his thoughts about the 2008 Olympics
– and much, much, more!

Click here for the entire interview. Thanks, Raymond!

Similarly, here’s a specific article on Yao’s thoughts about the Chinese team’s readiness for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Raymond has translated another interview of Yao in the YaoMania! forum. I’m not sure if I believe one part of what this Chinese reporter has written, though.

It wouldn’t be the first time a Chinese reporter may have taken liberty in putting words in Yao’s mouth. So I preface this interview with “reader beware” — not all of it may be true. Can you guess which part it is?

Raymond, our correspondent in China, has translated one of the first articles written about Yao Ming‘s thoughts about getting reunited with former Rocket guard Steve Francis after he was acquired last Friday by Houston. Raymond says that many Chinese are extremely happy that Francis is coming back to play with Yao.

Raymond has also put together a collage of old photos of Yao and Francis in this YaoMania! forum to show how well they got along with each other as teammates.

Written by a Titan Sports writer and appearing on Tom.com, here’s Raymond’s translation with some interesting quotes highlighted:

Two days after the announcement that he had signed a 2-year $5 million contract (with a player option in the second year) with the Houston Rockets, Steve Francis finally returned to Houston where he originally belonged. He happily picked up the telephone, dialed Yao Ming’s number and yelled out loud to him who was far away in China: “Hey ! I’ve come back!!”

“Ever since I arrived into the NBA, I just watched (helplessly) teammates after teammates traded away (at the end of every season). Teammates that I was familiar with got traded away, and in came some strangers, one after the other. You just have to go through such cycle of knowing new teammates, sending off acquainted teammates and then new teammates again. I have already got used to this kind of feeling, but this is not a good feeling at all. Now finally an old friend manages to return, and he is no one but my Lao Da.”

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I love how Yao has fought back against the criticism he received a few days ago from the official Chinese sports newspaper — China Sports Daily — about how he had been taking too much personal time before rejoining the Chinese National Team. You know, petty things like getting some rest after his long NBA season ended, attending pre-Beijing Olympic festivities, volunteering for the Special Olympics event and Basketball Without Borders camp, planning his wedding, etc.).

Here’s what Yao said about the matter earlier today:

“I know Chinese law protects people’s right of speech but I feel this is unfair on me. I entered the national team at the age of 18 and have competed for the national team for 10 years. I promise I have played with 100 per cent focus every year. The team are witnesses to my improvement and also my commitment.”

“I won’t be bothered by the report, I know there is only one goal for me and them – the Olympics.”

Good work, Yao.

Read the rest of this entry »

YaoMania! correspondent Raymond has translated another Chinese article, this time about the loss of Juwan Howard through the Mike James trade, and what he thinks the Rockets could use at power forward — although the jury is still out until new head coach Rick Adelman starts making his mark on the team. Click here for the translation.

Our YaoMania! correspondent Raymond has translated a Chinese article about how Yao is amazed at how effective Carroll Dawson is in teaching him how to become a better big man. What’s sad is that CD has been so close, but yet so far (probably thanks to Jeff Van Gundy‘s unwise preference that Dawson not get involved — can you say ‘power trip’ or ‘paranoid?’).

I also find it interesting how Yao didn’t mention Patrick Ewing in this interview. It just goes to show that Ewing wasn’t that great of a coach as it relates to Yao’s progress…as we all expected.

Here’s the translation:

After practicing with 68-year-old Carroll Dawson for a week, Yao Ming somewhat sighed with regret how time has flown by so quickly, and more regrettably how he found out that the most suitable coach (for centers) for him was no one but this old man who had been watching him from courtside for the past 5 years.

“It is all purely about technique (for the centers), extremely delicate and detailed stuff.” This is how Yao Ming described Carroll Dawson’s training. “He just nitpicks on my game and techniques as a center. For 5 years, this is by far the sort of training I never had before.”

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