Lets Take A Look Back At When Nate Robinson Blocked Yao Ming
Nate Robinson was having a good start to the season.
He was easily averaging 13 points off of the bench and was one of the New York Knicks' key bench guys in his second NBA season.
He was playing well and feeling good with his game.
But for whatever reason, on this particular night -on Nov. 20, 2006- he couldn’t get a shot off.
He played 6 minutes in the first half and didn’t take a single shot.
And I’m sure this was frustrating for him as he was taking nine shots a game and knocking down 50 percent of them in previous outings.
By the third, his pent-up aggression needed to be released -or at least I think it did- because what he did was nothing short of violent.
With 25 seconds left in the third quarter, the Houston Rockets’ Yao Ming was setting up in the post.
Houston was moving the ball around a lot, discombobulating the Knicks’ defence, and they lost track of their assignments. Somehow, the ball movement left Yao alone beside the basket.
Tracy McGrady noticed this and attacked the basket to draw in more defenders. As the help D came, he dished it off to Yao, who went up for presumably a dunk.
I say “presumably” because the dunk didn’t happen. Neither did a layup. Or a shot.
The reason why is because of Nate Robinson.
Being the super athlete that he is, he recognized that none of his teammates were on Yao and he slid over to help.
And as Yao was going up for a two-handed dunk, Robinson also went up with him and denied the giant.
KryptoNate knocked the ball out of Yao’s hands into the hands of a teammate, which led to a fastbreak.
Unfortunately, his heroics didn’t help the Knicks get the win this time out.
The Rockets beat them 97-90.
But even though it was a bad day for New York, it was a good day for past and future fans because we got to witness one of the shortest players (Nate: 5”9’) in NBA history viciously deny one of the tallest players (Yao: 7”6’) to ever play the game.
Nate Robinson would go on to have many more blocks on much bigger players later in his career.
But I would like to think this was the one that opened Pandora’s box.
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