Jeremy Lin not the first Asian player to win the NBA – inside the bizarre tale of Sun Yue’s 2009 championship with Kobe Bryant’s LA Lakers
- The ‘Chinese Magic Johnson’ won a ring without playing a minute before being waived
- Former agent reveals inside story of how he almost never got drafted and how it could all have been different
Jeremy Lin may be the first Asian-American winner of the NBA, but he is not the first player of Chinese heritage to win the NBA – and neither of the others played as much as the 51 seconds Lin managed.
The first Asian player to win an NBA championship was Mengke Bateer with the San Antonio Spurs. The Inner Mongolian rode the bench all the way to his ring in 2003.
The other was not Wang Zhizhi, the first Chinese player signed to the NBA, nor was it Yao Ming, the eight-time NBA All-Star.
Wang beat Yao Ming to the NBA by a year, joining the Dallas Mavericks in 2001 – two years after he was drafted. Yao followed him to Texas and the Houston Rockets after winning the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) in 2002.
Wang by this time had refused to play for China and this affected Yao’s draft. The big man had to agree to represent his country and the Houston Rockets had to agree to draft Yao as the first pick overall to make it happen.
Such chicanery was at play by the time Sun Yue, the first Han Chinese player to win the NBA, entered the draft in 2007. That is according to his former agent Keith Glass in his book, Seven Foot Man-Eating Chicken.