With Yi, the Nets Hope to Expand Their Market (original) (raw)

June 28, 2008

Yi Jianlian was about 7,000 miles away when he made the move from Milwaukee to New Jersey. As he trained with the Chinese Olympic basketball team, the Nets made a three-player trade with the Milwaukee Bucks on Thursday afternoon, before the N.B.A. draft, acquiring the 7-foot Yi and putting him in the spotlight on the East Coast.

The deal sent the longtime Nets star Richard Jefferson to the Bucks, who also sent Bobby Simmons to New Jersey. On the court, Yi is regarded as a mobile big man with a good shooting touch from midrange. But the Nets are hoping that off the court, he will help attract a new pool of fans. With sizeable Chinese communities in North Jersey and Brooklyn, where the Nets are scheduled to begin playing in 2010, Yi could be the Nets’ marketing answer to the Houston Rockets’ Yao Ming.

“It opens up a truly new fan base for us,” said Brett Yormark, the Nets’ chief executive. “Yi is going to give us the opportunity to be relevant to Asian-American fans in ways we haven’t been before.”

Within hours of the trade’s confirmation, the Nets’ marketing efforts were in full swing. Their Web site had a splash page of Yi in a Nets uniform, announcing, “Something big has come to New Jersey.” They offered a free Yi jersey to everyone who purchased a season ticket. According to Yormark, the Nets sold 200 season tickets in the 36 hours after the trade.

This was the kind of exposure that Yi had made such a fuss about when he was drafted by the Bucks with the sixth overall pick in 2007. Initially, reports said that he did not want to sign with the Bucks because he and his agent, Dan Fegan, had hoped Yi would play in a market with a larger Asian population. But the concern he cited more widely involved playing behind Andrew Bogut, another 7-footer taken first in the 2005 draft. Fegan pushed for Yi to be traded, but two months after he was drafted, Yi and his Chinese professional team which allowed Yi to be in the draft reached an agreement with the Bucks.

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Yi Jianlian will be wearing a Nets uniform after playing his rookie season with the Bucks.Credit...Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

“We’ve talked to the Bucks and the Rockets so we can learn from their mistakes and, more often, replicate what they did,” Yormark said. “We jumped right on it.”

During his first season in the N.B.A., Yi averaged 6.6 points and 5.2 rebounds and had 56 blocks in 66 games. But like many imported big men, he has a more fluid game than a traditional inside player. Alongside the Nets’ first pick in this year’s draft, the 7-foot center Brook Lopez from Stanford, Yi is expected to help provide the frontcourt size the team lacked last season.

“Traditionally, the Nets have been a very good perimeter team,” General Manager Kiki Vandeweghe said. “We suffered a little bit with lack of low-post scoring last year, lack of interior defense.

“I think we’ve now got some big players who can score and shoot from the outside,” he added.

Yi is one of the first pieces of the Nets’ rebuilding effort after a disappointing 34-48 season, the first time they missed the playoffs since 2001. By the end of draft day, the Nets had acquired three 20-year-olds.

But Yi’s experience might be tested with the Nets, as it was in Milwaukee. He will probably be one of eight players on the Nets next year with fewer than three years of N.B.A. experience. Yi spent five years with a Chinese professional team, the Guangdong Tigers, and represented China at the 2004 Olympics, but he often seemed raw in his 49 N.B.A. starts.

The Nets seem to be banking on youth as they move toward 2010. With the Jefferson trade, they will be well below the salary cap by then and may be looking at a spectacular free-agent class that could include LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Amare Stoudemire and Chris Bosh. Yi appears to have two seasons to live up to his potential before the Nets shift approaches from rebuilding to contending.

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