Bucks Scout Won’t Forget First Glimpse Of Yi

Yi Jianlian was selected by the Bucks with the 6th overall pick in this year's NBA Draft. (Getty)

With this in mind, Scott Howard made sure he took notes when he was dispatched to Teaneck, N.J. five years ago to scout the 2002 adidas ABCD All-American Basketball Camp at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

He no doubt drew up some rave reviews on a high school senior-to-be from Akron, Ohio by the name of LeBron James, just like all of his colleagues did.

He also observed the likes of Sebastian Telfair, Travis Outlaw, Trevor Ariza, Kris Humphries and Brandon Bass, who were cashing National Basketball Association paychecks last season.

Upcoming college stars such as Darius Washington, Randolph Morris, Mustafa Shakur and Aaron Brooks were in the house, too.

As fate would have it, though, none of those players became the most significant one Howard filed a report on after four days of montoring over 200 of the world’s best teenage basketball players.

Today, the Milwaukee Bucks can be grateful that Howard brought his archives of notebooks – and his memory banks -- with him when he became the latest addition to their scouting staff on March 6, 2006.

One of the reports Howard filed following that adidas ABCD camp was on a 6 foot-9 inch, 220-pound forward from the Si Yi region of Guangdong, China who was visiting the United States for the first time. His name was Yi Jianlian.

“I remember the very first report I wrote on the kid four years ago,” Howard said. “It said, ‘This kid’s gonna be a star.’

“It’s fun and interesting to see when your first impressions are accurate and they come true.”

Yi did not take the ABCD Camp by storm. But the fact that he was competitive there against his American contemporaries represented a king-sized step – about a 9,300-mile one – considering he did not play his first basketball game until the age of 12, when he already stood 6-3. And at that stage of his life, he was more interested in watching cartoons than in learning a demanding sport.

Yi’s visit to the United States, though, changed his perspective dramatically. His Guangdong junior coach commented at the time that, “It was an eye-opening experience for him. He came back with a very clear vision of where he wanted to go: the NBA.”

Howard believed such an objective was a realistic one.

“The first time I saw Yi, I remember thinking, ‘Wow! What an agile big kid,’” Howard recalled. “I was thinking he’d be an agile, 6-9 3 man because he had very good perimeter skills.”

Howard, who was scouting for the Washington Wizards at the time, had 17 years of college coaching experience to his credit, having worked at the University of Miami, Nebraska, Southern California, Drake, Southern Illinois and Iowa. So he knew a prospect when he saw one, and he stayed on Yi’s trail.

“Yi played in the Nike Hoop Summit, and he played in two or three games in the Global Games in Texas,” Howard said. “In the Global Games, he played for the World Team – the best kids from all over the world play against the best high school kids from our country. He’d kept growing. I said to myself, ‘Oh my, he’s growing and he still has those skills he had the first time I saw him. It’s hard to believe he’s so much better.’”

Yi joined the Guangdong Southern Tigers of the Chinese Basketball Association in 2002, and was named the league’s rookie of the year following the 2002-03 season. He helped lead the Tigers to three consecutive championships and a runner-up finish last year, when he averaged 24.9 points and 11.5 rebounds per game.

His game and his career truly hit the fast track, however, as he gained international basketball experience. He posted meager averages of 1.9 points and 1.5 rebounds in the FIBA Under-19 World Championships, but his numbers went up dramatically as he continued growing in terms of height, weight and basketball IQ.

Howard’s classification of Yi changed as time went by.

“Over the years, he filled out, got stronger, and I saw him as a 4 man with good ball skills and face-the-basket skills,” Howard said. “The growth he’d made since that first time I saw him was significant, not only physically, but in terms of his career – and he’s still up the upswing.

“I thought this was a guy we should be keeping an eye on.”

So Howard – and a lot of other NBA scouts – did exactly that.

Yi made his debut with the China Senior National Team in the 2004 Olympic Games.

“I saw him with the Chinese Olympic Team in 2004, and I saw him play in the Albert Schweitzer Games in Germany that year,” Howard said. “He ran the floor well, and he was a good athlete for his size range. He held his own. He got limited minutes because of his size and age, but he looked like a great NBA prospect for the future.

“I figured he was easily a high, first-round pick whenever he comes out.”

Yi Jianlian’s height alone made him an intriguing prospect from the the first time National Basketball Association teams heard about him.

But his dramatically developing skill set, athleticism and basketball savvy were what truly impressed the scouts who began following him worldwide when he was in his middle teens.

Owner of an attention-grabbing vertical leap, he could already reach 11 feet-6 inches (a foot and a half above the rim) when he joined the Chinese Basketball Association’s Guangdong Southern Tigers in 2002.

He worked on his conditioning until he could run the court as fast as anyone his size.

He was displaying a technically sound jump shot and shooting it accurately to 18 or 19 feet, and also became proficient with a baby hook and a turn-around jump shot from close range.

He had exhibited impressive instincts from the very first time he appeared in the U.S., during the 2002 adidas ABCD Camp, but he was also learning and mastering a lot of intangibles.

“He was always a very aware kid with terrific court awareness and reaction time,” said Howard. “I always like that in a player. He’d had a lot of different coaches, including Del Harris (the father of Bucks General Manager Larry Harris), who coached his national team at one time, and a Lithuanian coach who’s coaching his national team now. Because he’d been exposed to so much internationally, that’a a great asset for him.”

“And he’s a team player. There’s no question he’s a team player.”

Howard, who had left the Wizards to become Director of International Player Personnel with the Toronto Raptors for two years, joined the Bucks’ scouting staff in March of 2006. From that point on, he and his colleagues continued following Yi collectively.

“Dave Babcock (the Bucks’ Director of Player Personnel) saw him play in China, and Larry Harris saw him play in Japan and in the Olympics in Athens,” Howard said. “I’ve probably seen him play 30 games in four years.”

In Howard’s estimation, his most pivotal observation of Yi came during the Asian Games in Qatar in December of 2006. By then, Yi had grown to 6 feet-11 inches and over 240 pounds.

“The trip to Qatar in December of 2006 was made only to see Yi,” Howard said. “It was a special one. China played the other national teams in the Asian Games. They played against a number of different Asian countries.

“That was pivotal in our analysis of Yi. What we saw was that he’d made the transformation into becoming an NBA player. For me personally, there was no question he could play in the NBA after seeing him in Qatar.”

Howard reached his conclusion, in part, because Yi was put to the test by some rugged competition.

“His competition there was against older, more experienced players,” he said. “When China played the gold-medal game against Qatar, every player on Qatar’s roster had played college ball in the U.S. The play was definitely good enough to make an evaluation.”

So Howard completed his evaluation and forwarded it back to Milwaukee.

“I always file reports,” he said. “Once there, I filed mine. Everyone (on the Bucks management team) reads that. We had tape of that tournament, and Larry (Harris), Dave (Babcock) and (scout) Scott Roth watched that. We watched Yi play in the Chinese Championships on NBA TV. We had film from the World Championships of him playing against the U.S. 'Dream Team.'”

“The more you saw, the more you were impressed. All of our evaluations said, ‘We’d better start to look real hard at this guy.’”

The members of the Bucks basketball staff continued to keep their eyes and ears open. With the 2007 NBA Draft approaching and Milwaukee slated to pick sixth, the sights and sounds around the league indicated that Yi could very well be on the board when their turn came up.

“We were down to two or three players for our lottery pick,” Howard said. “We all did our research and tried to determine who’d be gone by the time we picked. We figured (Greg) Oden, (Kevin) Durant and probably (Al) Horford would be gone. Then we heard that Mike Conley would probably go to Memphis, which he did. We thought there was a chance Yi might go to Boston, but that didn’t happen.”

By committee, the wheels kept turning.

“We made more phone calls to see if Yi was a worthwhile pick for us, and to see if he wanted to play in the NBA,” Howard said. “From everything we gathered, the pick was a no-brainer.

“Dave (Babcock) had been to China four years ago to talk with Yi’s coach. Larry’s dad had coached him. I know people who know Yi intimately. So we gathered a lot of information on him. At the end of the day, you figure out how to get it done.”

And the Bucks did get it done.

At this writing, Yi is in China preparing for the World Championships, but Howard looks forward to the day he arrives in Milwaukee -- and the years to follow.

“People here will embrace him when they see what he’s about,” Howard said. “And there is no doubt in my mind that this kid will play for us.”