By: Stephen Patterson
You probably won't find Houston Rocket's center Yao Ming out running on the track anytime soon. Over the past five seasons, Ming has suffered four injuries involving his knees and feet. For a player his size (7'6), leg injuries are usually a quick and painfully slow end to a career. But being injury prone isn't the only thing that's gone wrong with Yao's NBA career. Considering the amount of hype surrounding Yao's NBA arrival, Ming may have been one of the most overhyped players in NBA history.
Having been taken with the 1st overall pick in the 2002 NBA Draft, Ming's arrival in Houston was surrounded by almost constant media attention leading into the season. Not only was the coverage dominating U.S. airwaves, it was one of the most covered sports stories in Chinese history covering one of their best players ever. In his first ever regular season game against the Indiana Pacers, Ming posted an astonishing 0 points and 2 rebounds. While Ming went on to average 13.5 points and 8.2 rebounds for his rookie season, he still lost Rookie of the Year honors to Amare Stoudemire.Before we go further into the reasons why Ming may have been one the most overhyped players ever, consider some of the players that were in the 2002 draft taken after him: Amare Stoudemire, Caron Butler, John Salmons, Carlos Boozer, Matt Barnes, and teammate Luis Scola. While these players weren't the only good players drafted that season, I do consider the first five to have had better careers thus far and Scola is on the right path to joining that group.
While many scouts and sports writers thought Yao would be the most dominate big man to ever step onto an NBA court, Ming never even approached reaching those expectations. In his first game against Shaquille O'Neal (who was one of the players Ming would supposedly dominate during his career), the stats looked like this: Ming 10 points 10 rebounds. O'Neal 31 points 13 rebounds. Sure didn't take long for Ming to start letting down his supporters calling for him to be the next Russell or Chamberlain.
Ming had his best statistical season in the 2006-07 season, averaging 25 points and 9.4 rebounds. That year wasn't a good year for Ming, however, as it marked the beginning of a long line of injuries. While Ming played in 244 of a possible 246 regular season games over his first three seasons, he has since only appeared in 237 of a possible 410 games. To make matters worse for Ming, he has only taken the Rockets past the first round of the playoffs once, and that ended in yet another injury and disappointing end to Houston's season.
Being the 1st overall pick and having 8 seasons available to him (he missed all of last season with his latest injury, a stress fracture in his left foot), Ming has only appeared on two All-NBA 2nd teams and three All-NBA 3rd teams. He hasn't once been on an All-NBA 1st team, never even taken his team to the Conference Finals, and hasn't come close to putting up numbers you would imagine when picturing a player supposedly on the level of Russell and Chamberlain.
While most of the media was hyping Yao to be Houston's next Dream, there were some scouts and writers who believed Ming would be a complete bust including Bill Simmons and Dick Vitale. While it's hard to call Ming a total bust, it's very easy for me to say he never came close to acheiving the level of greatness that was expected of him when he was drafted and was perhaps the most overhyped player ever.
Ming has already made over $75 million from Houston and I highly doubt they will keep him around for more than the mid-level exception when his contract runs up, if at all. Coming off his third injury to his left foot, this one being feared career ending when diagnosed over a year ago, I honestly don't think Ming will ever be more than a 10/10 player if he's lucky. But considering he's only averaged 10+ boards twice in a season, that's even likely too tall of a task for the 7'6 center to reach.
