There's nothing like studying top draft picks in decent competition from the 2nd row at midcourt. You just can't witness naunces from a TV screen -- or worse, a laptop monitor -- like you can this close to the players. I went to Vegas last week to catch two games live of Yi Jianlian and the Chinese National Team. ESPN.com's Chad Ford had Yi ranked right behind Greg Oden and Kevin Durant for the 2007 NBA Draft, and Yi looked pretty good as a mobile 7-footer with skills in pre-draft workouts.

After watching a multitude of various summer league 7-footers, of which Spencer Hawes was probably the most skilled, you could see from the ESPN pre-draft workout clip that Yi really does have a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the Chinese National Team is doing almost nothing to tap that potential...

There's nothing like studying top draft picks in decent competition from the 2nd row at midcourt. You just can't witness naunces from a TV screen -- or worse, a laptop monitor -- like you can this close to the players. I went to Vegas last week to catch two games live of Yi Jianlian and the Chinese National Team. ESPN.com's Chad Ford had Yi ranked right behind Greg Oden and Kevin Durant for the 2007 NBA Draft, and Yi looked pretty good as a mobile 7-footer with skills in pre-draft workouts.

After watching a multitude of various summer league 7-footers, of which Spencer Hawes was probably the most skilled, you could see from the ESPN pre-draft workout clip that Yi really does have a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the Chinese National Team is doing almost nothing to tap that potential.

There are three glaring problems with Team China, all of which make Yi look particularly bad on the court. These team diseases affect his low point production, silly violations, tendency to get into foul trouble, seemingly terrible defense, and probably his self-esteem, I'm sorry to say:

1. No talent whatsoever in the backcourt

In short, Team China's guards are atrocious by NBA standards.

Laker 2nd-round draft pick Sun Yue is, indeed, the quickest guard on the Chinese National Team, but that ain't saying much. All of the guards on Team China are unable to handle the rock and lack any court vision. Once or twice per game, Yi will be on the wing during an early offense and, of course, the guard will not even see him. They can hit the three, but that's about it. They can't even execute an entry pass into Yi on the block. This team sorely needs a true ballhandler, someone who can handle NBA pressure and make a defender pay for not playing containment man-to-man, by blowing past and putting the defense on their heels. This is the clearest indication to me that Chinese basketball is lagging far, far behind the NBA or even Europe.

An inept Team China guard throws the ball in after a dunk to the opposition, then on the ensuing fast break, throws the ball into the first row.

Team China's guards are all around 6'4", shoot flat-footed threes, dribble too upright, can't get their center-of-gravity low enough to penetrate, don't have the shoulder strength to initiate contact, and can't change direction on a dime. It's as if the general managers who picked this team said that the pre-requisite for making the team as a guard was, you had to be 6'4" and you had to be able to make a flat-footed three.

That's not how we pick point guards here in the NBA or for Team USA, for that matter. I'm pretty sure I've seen a few decent guys, who might look as if they are of Chinese descent, in rec leagues handling the point American-style. I'm not sure what the specific Olympic rules are for nationality, but with 16 roster spots Team China ought to at least take one flyer and see how he pans out, even if he's only 5'9" or something.

Team China's style of play is very "tree-ish", like the Ents from Lord of the Rings. Sometimes Yi had position down low and showed a target, but his teammate couldn't make the pass and the window of opportunity closed. It's like having two or three Jason Kaponos trying to run your offense. It's no wonder they came in 15th out of 24 teams at the 2006 FIBA World Championships.

Anyhow, it's evident that the Lakers' pick in Sun was a marketing gimmick.

2. The coaching staff and general management

I just refuse to believe that a nation with such a large population, as well as the sheer number of Chinese living elsewhere in the world, can produce a team that is so lacking at the guard position. Then you have the hiring of coach Jonas Kauslaukas. Kauslaukus not only has a communication barrier with the players, but he's calling the wrong plays for the wrong people to begin with. He's trying to run traditional sets with a team that lacks a bonafide or traditional point guard and, in the absence of Yao Ming, a bonafide or traditional post player. You've got to be more creative with your pieces.

At every offensive set, if the offense even survives to about 10 seconds left on the shotclock without turning the ball over, you'll see Yi set two or three picks for other people. The only problem is, they're not for anybody special. They're not even for leading scorer Wang Zhi Zhi. There's no such thing as pick-and-roll. It's more like pick-and-hope-for-the-best.

So when Yi rolls down and posts in the paint after the pick, rarely does he ever get the entry pass. So what was the whole point of that play?

Wang Zhi Zhi offensive foul, but what are those two useless picks Yi Jianlian is setting?

If I were coaching Team China, I'd get Yi the ball somewhere between the top and wing, then clear out, especially if his defender is a typical slow-footed 7-footer, with one other guard on the same side of the floor. I'd put Wang on the weakside wing as an outlet 2nd option. A guard would then come sacrifice his body and set the pick on Yi's man, allowing Yi to more easily get around the 7-footer or switch on a smaller guard, at which point Yi could take one more dribble, then a jump shot that would be practically uncontested due to the height difference, or he could just use his long strides and keep the ball high to overpower the smaller, switched defender. I would practice this play over and over again.

Yi's strengths are his height, his mobility and his developing skillset. Use them, for chrissakes!

Aside from strategic blunders, you've got the language barrier. Kauslaukas doesn't even appear to be speaking in English, a language the Chinese players might understand (Wang was heard yelling, "First time, huh?" to a newbie Japanese referee early in the Knicks game after getting called on a violation), let alone Chinese. So then you've got something as simple as a 30-second blood timeout, which happened in the Team China vs Knicks game, when Yi got scraped on the forearm and was bleeding a little bit. Kauslaukus immediately summons a sub for Yi, but doesn't know that by rule, all Yi has to do is clean the blood up within 30 seconds, cover it with a band-aid, and he's good to go. So you just took an impact player off the floor because you didn't understand what the ref was saying with the blood rule.

Couple the language barrier with the coach's worst nightmare of having too many things to fix on your plate, and you've got disaster. In one sequence against the Knicks, Team China blows a layup off a steal by Sun, but Yi still subsequently gets the ball down low on little Nate Robinson, only to pass the ball out to Wang who misses a three.

Of course, Kauslaukus at this point is barking at his team, but none of the players know what he's saying or at whom he's directing it. What does he want corrected? The Chinese players all give him a blank look. He'll yell out a name, use a hand and arm gesture, then shrug his shoulders in dismay, but so many things went wrong on that play, what's the use? You have the blown layup, passed the ball out of situation where your man is a foot-and-a-half taller than the opposition and right next to the basket, and your other 7-footer took an ill-advised trey as a result. Call a timeout and choose one guy to berate. Every coach knows that.

In the game against Boston, after nearly two games of non-production, Yi made an and-one and Kauslaukus took him out. Here's a rare opportunity for Yi to get into a groove, maybe get hot, and the coach takes him out. Inexplicable.

3. The absence of Yao Ming

If Yao was around, you could move Wang Zhi Zhi to the 3, where he's more comfortable facing the basket and essentially have him play the point forward if one of the inept guards can at least get the ball advanced past halfcourt. Then you can go treetop to treetop with Yao or Yi posting up and banish the other two useless guards to the other side of the court. Of course, there's no telling if Kauslaukus would ever think of that.

Yao could cover up some of the two fundamental blunders above. His presence in the paint and the fact that he's got an advantageous wingspan would probably make something as basic as an entry pass easier to execute for the inept guards. The presence of Yao could free up Yi.

Without Yao, Team China and Yi have no hope.

An example of how Yi Jianlian has position down low and shows a target for his teammate, but instead, his teammate (in this case the one-dimensional Li Nan) decides he can't get it in and launches from downtown.

The plight of Yi

So let's get back to the analysis of Yi. Yi actually does a splendid job of sealing his man and presenting a target in the post. He's in the upper echelons of 7-footers in that skillset. During the rare times his teammate does hit his target inside the paint, Yi's had trouble figuring out what to do. He's too hesitant and can't make up his mind. If you've ever tried to make a jump-stop move against scrubs at the playground then tried the same thing against college recruits at the university rec center, you know what I mean. While I'm sure it's a dominating move back in China's CBA, at summer league Yi was called for traveling on jump-stops or hooking on moves to the basket. It's probably because the defenders at summer league are much quicker, combined with a bevy of teammates that pose no threat to the other side of the defense.

It's also probably because he doesn't get the ball that much when he's ready for it, so when he finally does get the ball, he feels a bit awkward. Just try and remember how it was for you as a young player on a high school varsity team where the offense was like chaos. Or a pickup game where the guards had no clue what they were doing. The feel of the leather becomes so foreign, all of a sudden.

Sometimes he ought to just launch an unblockable midrange jumper, but no one else on his team is ever underneath, ready to rebound, so he decides not to. Or if they do happen to be underneath, they're committing a three-second violation. By the time he decides to put the ball on the floor, it's already too late. Either he tries to do too much in one motion and gets called for a travel or a charge, or a weakside defender flashes over and he has to give up the ball to an inept guard -- it's the typical lack of basketball IQ coming from a 19-to-21 year-old, where holding the ball is a sign of lack of aggressiveness. And he won't see the ball again due to the 24-second shotclock.

Yi Jianlian sometimes can't make a decision on what to do. Here, a Team China guard finally breaks through to the paint, which was facilitated by the poor choice of double-teaming the indecisive Yi by guard Gabe Pruitt.

On defense, Yi's got some naive habits like jumping diagonally to block a shot, risking a foul, when he can just stay straight up. Sometimes he hacks downward with his arms when, again, he can just stay straight up. Again, these are mistakes typical of rookies. But the worst part is, predictably, his guards are not doing a good job on man-to-man defense and basically leaving him trying to cover two players looking to attack near the basket. He's not getting help on offense, and he's not getting help on defense.

As you can guess from the workout clip, Yi looks good during warmups. He sort of glides across the hardwood, much more elegantly than most other 7-footers you see at the NBA level, such as the aforementioned Spencer Hawes. You wonder if Yi swapped with Hawes on the Sacramento Kings' lineup, you get the sense that, with the same King guards such as the reliable Francisco Garcia responsible for ballhandling, Yi would have looked a little better than Hawes and probably made a few more shots than Hawes. Too bad we almost never get to see Yi's unique right-side-of-the-head set shot. Come to think of it, what was the point of warmups? Team China simply does not get the ball to Yi at any opportune time. When will he ever get a layup or an open midrange jumper during summer league?

Altogether, if you're looking for basketball entertainment, Team China is absolutely unwatchable. Robinson completely tore up the defense as if he were back on the blacktop. If I were an NBA owner at summer league, I would insist that my team not have to face the Chinese National Team. How does playing against them help my player development? You're never going to face a team built like that in the NBA. Your guards aren't facing NBA-caliber defense. Beyond that is a domino effect. I'd rather my young little summer league squad get beat up by another team than build false confidence by cruising through a game against such a porous team.

None of this is helping Yi and complicates the issue with the Milwaukee Bucks. It's somewhat ironic because the Chinese officials involved with Yi want him to develop and lift the Chinese National Team to the next level on the Olympic stage, in front of an audience of a billion on their homecourt in Beijing, but even if Yi somehow developed into NBA all-star caliber, there still would be no one on Team China to get him the ball.