AFTER two critical wins that had made their home Olympic experience a success, China lost to Greece 91-77 in the final match of the preliminary round, finishing fourth in Group B of the men’s basketball competition yesterday.
China will play Lithuania, the top seed in Group A in the quarterfinals tomorrow and Greece will face the defending Olympic gold medalist Argentina.
Yao vowed to help China qualify for the quarterfinals at the Beijing Olympics and predicted the sixth-placing finish for China.
China can only finish eighth, same as that of the 2004 Athens Games, if they could not enter the semifinals.
All of these made Yao Ming rather unhappy after his team fell behind by 24 points in the first half and he played just over 18 minutes, scoring 16 points, grabbing five rebounds and spending the largest share of the second half on the bench.
“It’s a hard loss. We were too nervous at the start of the game,” China’s head coach Jonas Kaslauskas said. Talking about the playing time of Yao, he said: “I’m the head coach of the team. I can decide how long a player plays in a game.”
In contrast to his celebratory mood from Saturday’s win over Germany, Yao stalked angrily off the court and for the first time since the tournament began, refused to talk to reporters.
Vasileios Spanoulis and Ioannis Bourousis chipped in 19 points each for Greece.
(SD-Agencies)