Injuries forced Yao Ming to retire from the NBA this week, ending a eight-year career with the Houston Rockets. Eight years is an interesting number, because it’s a longer NBA career than the average player gets, but it’s short enough to leave a lot of “legacy” questions in doubt. Perhaps the biggest legacy question (aside from a “best ever” debate) is whether someone is a Hall of Famer. So we, the Crossover Chronicle crew, tackled the question in our latest roundtable: Is Yao Ming a Hall of Famer?
My Take:
I immediately feel like liberties need to be taken with a guy like Yao. Of the eight years in the league, only half of those were full seasons. He played 57, 48, 55 and five games in the four partial seasons. We can even toss the five-game season out and consider Yao’s career to have been seven seasons long. And, quite honestly, seven NBA seasons doesn’t provide you with enough statistical justification to consider Yao Ming for the Hall of Fame.
But when you consider his impact on the game of basketball, then the argument changes. What Yao Ming did for the NBA is still being measured. Because Yao opened up a two-way street between the NBA and China. Both the league and its superstar players found an untapped thirst for NBA basketball, and they are reaping incredible benefits because of it. Think of all the NBA’ers with Chinese shoe deals. Would Kevin Garnett be wearing Anta kicks if Yao didn’t exist? Would Baron Davis or Shaq be with Li Ning? Or how about Jason Kidd with Peak or Steve Nash with Luyou? And what about the Chinese leagues that have flourished and added NBA caliber players because of Yao?
And Yao made it all happen because Yao was good. He was very good. Wang Zhizhi didn’t bust this door down. And Yi Jianlian won’t exactly carry the torch. Yao was a game-changing kind of player who, for his immense size, had a fabulous finess aspect to his game. Yao deserved most of those All Star nods. And maybe we could argue that if you extrapolated his numbers out over a full, healthy career, there’d be little argument over his Springfield credentials. But to me, he didn’t need to play 13 years to get his ticket punched. Yao blazed a trail into a new market for the NBA. He was an amazing ambassador for the game. And we won’t know how far his reach went for quite some time. He may have done more for the NBA than all but a handful of players while he was in the league. And that, to me, makes him an easy choice for the Hall of Fame.
Matt Yoder
Yao Ming’s Hall of Fame candidacy is one of the most complex questions of this type I can ever remember. In terms of global impact on the game, Yao is a unanimous first ballot selection. It’ll be strange not to see the millions of votes for Yao to start the All-Star Game, whenever the next one may be. Yao brought the NBA to China and the rest of the world in a unique way and the true impact may never be quantified.
As far as Yao’s on the court resume, he was 8 for 8 in All-Star selections, but we can immediately throw that out the window due to the ballot box stuffing. Yao was never selected to an All-NBA First Team, making the Second Team twice and the Third Team three times. His career only lasted eight years in the NBA. His three year stretch from ’06-’09 was the best basketball of his career when he averaged 22.3/10.2, 25.0/9.4, and 22.0/10.8. But, Yao never played more than 57 games in a season in that stretch. If those numbers are good enough for the Hall in this era, then Shawn Marion, Jermaine O’Neal, Elton Brand, and Zach Randolph are all shoo-ins.
If we’re talking about Yao’s purely basketball career, he is not a Hall of Famer. In the end though, this is about weighing both areas of Yao’s legacy and the Hall of Fame voters will be very sentimental when it comes to Yao bringing the game to Asia and the world in a new way. Yao will end up in the Hall of Fame because of the global impact on the game and what he’s done for the popularity of basketball worldwide.
Jeff Garcia
Short answer is no.
What Yao has done over his short career is not too shabby but in the long run and when talking HOF, it’s just not enough. I’m pretty sure my colleagues here at Crossover already gave you his resume so I won’t rehash it again, but it is plainly obvious it just isn’t HOF worthy.
Although he was often injured, and his career may have been cut short, he certainly made a splash upon his arrival. He was touted as the next big man to rival Shaq, Chamberlain as far as dominance, and at first it looked like people were correct about him.
From his first game versus Shaq, his funny commercials, to his ambassador role for China, Yao did a lot and will be missed.
Not to take anything away from what he did on the court, I just hope the Basketball HOF does not use the sentimental card with Yao and enshrine him. To do so would be to water down the standards and open the flood gates to many other basketball players who do not deserve to be immortalized.
Philip Rossman-Reich
Yao Ming definitely had hall of fame potential. He is the most athletic and fluid player for a guy his size that the NBA had seen. He was also a great teammate and an impact player. Like so many players, injuries robbed him of his greatness. And while he was great when he was playing, he just never did enough. He won’t be going into the Hall of Fame as a player.
But Yao very much could (and probably should) enter the Hall of Fame someday as a contributor to the game. Ever since the Romans (really), China has been this untapped market that needed to be reached. It was seemingly impossible for the NBA to get into China. Now it has a full-time presence there and the NBA is arguably the most popular American sports league in China.
Because of Yao Ming, basketball quickly became the top sport in China. The Chinese government has put added emphasis on using basketball to promote health and sport in China. The NBA has been a big part of that plan and China now has as many basketball courts in their big cities as anywhere else. Basketball is very much part of the Chinese urban culture now.
Yao is going to take on a new role as an ambassador to China for the NBA, continuing the massive expansion the league has seen seen in that market. For this work, he is likely to see some recognition in the Hall of Fame. It just won’t be as a player.
To our benefit, Chinese NBA fans can’t vote for the Hall of Fame like they did for the All-Star game since Yao was drafted. Yao had the potential to be a Hall of Famer, but because of his constant injuries, he never had the chance to fully live up to that potential. Even his greatest NBA seasons came when his season was cut short 20-30 games. His injuries took away what could have been his prime from 2005-2008. As unfortunate as that may be for Yao, I don’t think you can continue to overlook players like Bernard King in favor of someone who could’ve been great,
Michael De Leon
To our benefit, Chinese NBA fans can’t vote for the Hall of Fame like they did for the All-Star game since Yao was drafted. Yao had the potential to be a Hall of Famer, but because of his constant injuries, he never had the chance to fully live up to that potential. Even his greatest NBA seasons came when his season was cut short 20-30 games. His injuries took away what could have been his prime from 2005-2008. As unfortunate as that may be for Yao, I don’t think you can continue to overlook players like Bernard King in favor of someone who could’ve been great.
Brendan Bowers
Yao Ming didn’t put up Hall of Fame numbers in his NBA career, but I think he gets in anyways based on the impact he had on the globalization of basketball. He’s not unlike Arvydas Sabonis in many ways either, who’s a member of the 2011 class, and if David Stern has any say in the matter I think he owes it to Yao to throw around whatever muscle he has with the committee to get him in there based on the NBA fans he brought with him from China. Sabonis was a European star long before guys like Dirk even thought it possible to make an NBA career of things, and as a Hall of Fame Inductee, Arvydas enters with this year’s class having only averaged 12 points and 7 rebounds during his seven seasons as a Trailblazer. Arvydas came at the tail end of career that saw his best days playing in Lithuania, and while it is different in the sense that Yao came during his prime, it’s also
similar too in that Yao Ming played in parts of only 8 seasons as well. He played in 476 total games during that time, to be precise, and averaged 19 points and 9 rebounds per game. That’s 7 points and 2 rebounds more that Sabonis, and he also inspired a billlion basketball fans in China to go crazy about both basketball and the NBA in the process. Beyond all that, Yao Ming illustrated in the time that he played that he did have HOF potential, and I think the guy deserves the nod one day for all those reasons despite the fact that injuries cut his career way too short. I expect he’ll eventually get that nod too.
AFP PHOTO
