YouTube Gold: Yao Ming’s Top Ten Plays

A great player and from all appearances a good man

Yao Ming has long since come and gone from the NBA scene - he was drafted in 2002 and retired in 2011 - but he left an indelible imprint on the world’s best basketball league.

At 7-6 and 310 lbs, Yao towered over everyone and even made giant Shaquille O’Neal look small. And unlike a lot of international players of his day, particularly big men, he had an instinctive grasp of the game. Perhaps the only international bigs who were comparable (both were actually better) were Arvidas Sabonis, who was basically a 7-4 Larry Bird, and Hakeem Olajuwon, who was rightly called “the Dream” because his play was so ethereal.

In these highlights, you see a lot of dunks of course, but you also see a spectacular, Bird/Sabonis type pass and also a move that is very much out of the Olajuwon playbook.

Unfortunately Yao started to have injuries roughly halfway through his career and a brilliant future grew cloudy. His feet and ankles became so problematic that he retired too soon in 2011. But even so, he is one of the more remarkable players in NBA history and set a standard for Asian players that no one has yet come close to. In basketball terms, and particularly in China and across Asia, he was a revolutionary figure.