The captain of the Chinese national team Yi Jianlian became the all time leading scorer in the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) in an away game on Thursday, leading Guangdong Southeast Tigers to ease past Tianjin Pioneers 140-93 in the eighth round of the league. Yi contributed 20 points for the visiting team in the match on Thursday as his total score rose up to 11,177 points, surpassing 11,165 points by his long-time teammate Zhu Fangyu.
Yi Jianlian Rumors
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Yi Jianlian
Position: -
Born: 06/21/91
Height: 7-0 / 2.13
Weight:229 lbs. / 104.3 kg.
Earnings: $14,085,936 ($16,775,823*)
Born: 06/21/91
Height: 7-0 / 2.13
Weight:229 lbs. / 104.3 kg.
Earnings: $14,085,936 ($16,775,823*)
The Chinese selection will play against Poland, Venezuela and Cote d’Ivoire. Abudushalamu Abudurexiti, Fang Shuo, Guo Ailun, Makan Kelanbaike, Ren Junfei, Sun Minghui Wang Zhelin, Yi Jianlian, Zhai Xiaochuan, Zhao Jiwei, Zhao Rui, and Zhou Qi.
For China, Guo Ailun banked 22 while Yi Jianlian was right behind with 20 points. Wang Zhelin added 15 and Zhou Qi ten points. Fang Shuo dished game-high ten assists along with his five points.
Search Google for “Yi Jianlian chair” and there are tens of thousands of results. The chair became a running joke in Bill Simmons’s writings and podcasts, and the then-ESPN columnist even went so far as to bestow Yi with a nickname that stuck: “Chairman Yi.”
The thing is, the chair workout almost certainly never happened, which means that the video almost certainly never existed. I’ve spoken with numerous scouts, execs, players, trainers, and media members, and not one remembers ever actually seeing the clip. I’ve obtained the broadcast-once, now-lost TV program in which the chair workout was allegedly aired, and it’s not there. No matter how sure you are you’ve seen the clip, you haven’t.
Even Larry Harris, the GM of the Milwaukee Bucks, was dubious of the video’s existence: “I had heard about it, but never followed up on it because I find it hard to believe that anyone in any NBA front office would not take a guy solely because he scored on a chair.”
Simmons claimed that he first saw the clip during the broadcast of an ESPN NBA Draft lottery show, but no one had been able to either locate that video in the subsequent years, and no footage of Yi posterizing a chair has ever surfaced. The footage’s disappearance has naturally spawned various conspiracy theories, including one that blamed the Chinese government for its removal.
