Since 2015, over 15,000 miles of high speed rail has been built in China—and another nearly 20,000 miles will be built by 2035. This year, researchers at Zhejiang University invented an adhesive “bone glue” that can heal fractures in minutes. It’s the Chinese century. And now they have their very own Nikola Jokic.
Taken with the 16th pick in this year’s draft by the Portland Trail Blazers, Yang Hansen is the first Chinese first rounder since Yi Jianlian in 2007. Although Yang (obviously) isn’t quite the next Jokic, he’s emblematic of the new generation of bigs who have grown up swimming in Jokic’s wake. Like Alperen Sengun and Derik Queen, Yang is a slick post-operator and passer, deriving more value from his on-ball skills than his off-ball menace.
From his appearances in Summer League and preseason alone, Yang has become a sensation. In China, his Summer League games had better TV ratings than the NBA Finals; his most rudimentary highlights immediately go viral on TikTok. He’s the face of the Trail Blazers. But is he their future?
Within the structure of an NBA possession, guards and ball-handlers primarily fuel what happens, but big men determine what is possible; they are the vowels in your Scrabble hand, the meter and rhyme scheme of your verse.
As such, the flaws of the center become inseparable from the flaws of the team. Whereas a shrimpy point guard or a non-dribbling wing can be masked within the larger framework of the offense, the center is the larger framework of the offense. If your center feels the blood rush to his head in a there’s a bird in the house panic every time he handles the ball in space, your guards are cursed to initiate their attack from obvious, non-threatening angles. If your center is a bad interior defender, your defense will never be that good. The outcome of a possession—a game, a series—is dictated as much by the biggest players as it is by the best.
Accordingly, Yang is interesting because his strengths could make him a star, but his weaknesses could prevent him from even being a starter. In the run-up to the draft, Yang was widely considered something of a long-term project, but he has acquitted himself well across 10 Summer League and pre-season appearances. Averaging 15.1 points, 7.1 rebounds and 3.9 assists per 36 minutes, he’s putting up roughly the same stats as he did last year in the Chinese Basketball Association.
At his best, Yang is a triumph of imagination. There are a handful of seven-footers who can pump fake into a behind-the-back dribble into a spin move into a scoop layup in traffic, but Yang actually dares to try it. Just 20 years old, he’s already a master of maintaining suspense, cloaking his true intentions with the ball until the last possible moment, wrong footing defenders with Pinoy steps and step-throughs.
More, Yang is a gifted, galvanizing passer. When he catches the ball, his teammates spring to life, shuttling around him for improvised give-and-gos and dribble handoffs. There’s an element of induced demand with Yang: his teammates are more likely to cut because their effort will be rewarded; they pass Yang the ball because they know he’ll readily pass it back.
Without a ball-dominant guard (or head coach), Yang, theoretically, allows Portland to reconcile the gap between their best players and their best lineups. Shaedon Sharpe, Toumani Camara and Deni Avdija can be reluctant passers because Yang can absorb more of that responsibility. Once Scoot Henderson returns from a torn hamstring, it’s easy to imagine Portland laying the seeds of a hyper-active, Yang-centric offense, surrounding their high-post playmaker with aggressive perimeter players, similar to the Light The Beam Kings.
But if Yang promises a glorious future, he’s also probably G League-bound in the near-present. In Portland’s season opener, Yang played just five minutes, grabbing one rebound and missing the only shot he took. While Yang was productive in lax, anything-goes preseason outings, he’s not yet able to handle the speed and toughness of real NBA games.
Despite his surplus of talent, he’s too physically underbaked to actually manifest it in any real way. At this point in his career, Yang is pretty firmly stuck behind Donovan Clingan and (eventually) Robert Williams, two conventional, rim-protecting centers. All of Yang’s hifalutin conceptual value is trumped by physical reality. He runs like he’s holding an iced coffee, trying to catch an elevator before the doors close; his movements are stiff, his shoulders narrow, his hips high. Clingan and Williams might not invert the pyramid of positional responsibilities or whatever, but they’re huge and they block shots and they grab rebounds. They do the things that a big man has to do because no one else can.
As teams outgrow smallball, Yang can be seen as a stand-in for the weird state of big man development. Whereas the best guards are basically better versions of average ones, the centers who dominate the league play a fundamentally different game than the majority of those who merely populate it; there are dozens of seven-footers who can jump high and block shots, but there’s only one Nikola Jokic. In this sense, there’s a world where Yang truly becomes the Chinese Jokic, but there are many more worlds where he’s something closer to the Chinese Drew Timme, his skillset outweighed by his physical limitations. Players who look like Yang usually become stars—it’s just that most of them are stars in leagues that aren’t the NBA.
And so, Yang’s shot at greatness is at odds with the probability of his goodness. It doesn’t matter that he can grab a rebound and initiate a fastbreak on his own if he can’t force the miss in the first place; his silken post moves won’t lead anywhere if he can’t finish through contact. The fate of the big man is decided by his ability to do the small things. The exceptional is only made possible by the expected.