Raymond has done a great job of translating this interview with Yao after the Rockets win against the Raptors where he was suffering terribly from the flu. Yao is such a gamer. It’s truly inspirational how selfless he is.

When you read the translation, think about how sick Yao must have felt. Then think about this: as sick as he was during this game, why in the world did Rick Adelman pick this game to play him the most amount of minutes in his entire NBA career in the first half: 23 out of 24 minutes!?

How could he have done that when Yao was at his weakest and sickest, and doesn’t even play him that kind of minutes when he’s healthy? You know Yao is such a pro, he wasn’t going to complain. But I just don’t think Adelman knows all that’s going on sometimes, as seen by how slow he was in giving more playing time to Aaron Brooks and Luis Scola.

For the second straight game, Yao stepped up after a lackluster game by the Rockets. Here’s what he said after the Philly debacle last night.

“When you are soft yourself, everything will feel tough. It’s not because they are so tough. It’s because of how soft we are.

“It’s weird that we changed that quick. I never had that feeling. I feel like they traded me to another team, a new team I’ve never been on before.”

Yao has called out his Chinese national teammates before, but this is really the first time he has done it with his American teammates. I really think that Yao can be a leader, but it takes a disaster like this one to get him there.

I like this article in today’s Chronicle about what Yao thinks needs to happen for his teammates to hit more of the shots they have been missing:

“Come early in the morning before practice. Maybe stay for a half-hour and take a couple hundred shots, like I do every day.

“Before the (last) game, I saw a lot of players doing this. I think we need more.”

Yao isn’t afraid to call it like he sees it. I like it. Keep it going, Yao. You’re a leader now.

In case you missed it in the discussion forum, Raymond has translated an interview that Yao gave recently after the Rockets win against Denver on Saturday night. I recommend it, and you can read it here.

Thanks Raymond!

Our Raymond has translated an interview from Titan Sports of Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian before tonight’s big game in Houston between the two Chinese countrymen.

In the photo below, Yao is seen picking up Yi on Thursday night at the Houston Four Seasons to go to dinner.

The interview questions were asked separately of both players, and they meshed the responses into one article.

I don’t know about you, but through Yi’s responses, he doesn’t have near the personality that Yao does. He’s kind of a dud in how he answers the questions. That’s not good in building his persona here in the U.S. Here’s the translation:

Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian have never donned different jerseys and confronted each other in any regular basketball competition. But now the time has come for that to materialize. November 10, 2007. Houston Rockets versus Milwaukee Bucks. Those experiences of playing against each other in team scrimmages of the national team suddenly become meaningless, because this is going to be a NBA regular season game, a genuine match-up. So right before the clash of the titans, Titan Sports conducted the following interview by asking the same questions to the 2 of them (at different locations).

Yi Jianlian: (After pondering for a long while) Long time no see.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our Raymond has done another great job translating an interview that Titan Sports did with Yao Ming after the Laker game, and before the Utah game. Here it is…

In the midst of the Salt Lake City night, looking out at an ice-cold and listless city from the window of his hotel room, the grief and bitterness of 6 months earlier suddenly rushed and welled into Yao Ming’s heart.

He manipulated the TV remote control in his hand, and there he saw a diminutive and bald commentator still with a pair of black eye sockets on the TV screen. Jeff Van Gundy, the man who single-handedly trained and pushed him to become the #1 center in the NBA had gone back to become a TV sports commentator. And the Houston Rockets have also said goodbye to his era of defensive-minded, rigid and mechanical style of play.

25 points and 12 rebounds: these are all career new-high for Yao Ming in an NBA season opener. Moreover, it was his very first win in season openers played away from home. But the only feeling Yao Ming had was…..it was sheer luck.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.