Playoffs?
Congratulations Erik Spoelstra of the Miami Heat, for being the first-ever API head coach in the NBA!
You have a lot of work to do. Your team sucks dude. Sorry.
But it got me thinking, I know a lot of folks think Yao Ming was the first Asian NBA player, but he was third in a run of three from China, the first of which was Wang Zhi Zhi. The other - Mengke Bateer - ended up the first Asian player to win an NBA championship, when he did so as a member of the San Antonio Spurs. Around this time, there was Japanese-born Yuta Tabuse who played for the Phoenix Suns for about half a dozen games before he was bounced. (Much love to the Milwaukee Bucks’s Yi Jianlian, who was having an inconsistent, but generally ill rookie year before injury took him out for the end of it.
But anyway, many of us don’t realize there was an Asian American in the NBA before all of them. Oh yes!
Say hello Asian America to Rex Walters. Current head coach of the University of San Francisco men’s basketball team, and former Sixer/Heat/Net. But he was also a member of those Japanese American basketball leagues that have been one of the most consistent and constant sources of cultural connection for JAs in California for decades. (In fact, the homie Tad Nakamura made a movie about it…more on that another day.)
So raise your glasses of soju or grass jelly drink or, you know, Johnnie Walker to all the Asian ballers from front to back.
Oh, and I speak for most of us here at Boston Progress Radio when I say: go Celtics!
(And their API strength coach Bryan Doo.)
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Tags: basketball.
What is wrong with the water in Atlanta? What’s up with taking the Celtics to the 7th game?
This reminds me of the year the #1 seeded Sonics played the Denver Nuggets back in 1994 when the Sonics were up 2-0. The Nuggets came back to win the best of five series. I have confidence in the Celtics though… cause Confidence Counts (that’s a book by Gary Payton).
hahaha. nice GP reference. but yeah. what the hell?
remember mutumbo lying on the ground holding the ball?
I thought his finger wagging was scary. But after seeing that picture of Mutumbo with that maniacal grin (if you can call it that) lying on the court holding the ball, well, every time I see him play, I just get the shivers.
i know other seattlites who get physically ill thinking about mutumbo holding the ball on the floor. i’m sure this back and forth makes no sense to someone who isn’t familiar with the scene we’re talking about.