Name: Yi Jianlian (易建联)
Age: 20 (dob: Oct. 20, 1987)
Hometown: Heshan, Guangdong Province
Previous Olympic Medals Won: None

    Little is known about how Yi Jianlian will perform in the ’08 Olympics, his first on the Chinese Olympic Basketball Team. Surely mainland fans hope he’ll fare better than he has during his rookie season with the Milwaukee Bucks. Wisconsin fans have been understandably disappointed by the 7ft power forward who was once compared to German sharpshooter Dirk Nowitzki.

    Although Yi won a spot as a starter with the Bucks, he’s posted an anemic 9.8 points and 5.8 rebounds per game, small potatoes compared to the 24.9 points and 11.5 rebounds he averaged during his final season with the Guangdong Tigers. A sense of disappointment may be mutual. When he was first drafted, Yi complained that a Chinese star with his talent ought to play somewhere with a larger market and a larger Chinese population -- like New York City. Critics have since painted his poor performance as a silent protest.

    On January 30, David Thorpe, who writes a column for espn.com called Rookie Watch, dropped Yi to number 10 on his list of the top 10 rookies in the NBA (Yi was once as high as number 2) because he’s, “still slipping, especially inside as a rebounder. We'd like to see him engaged in battle a lot more. So far, January is proving to be Yi's worst month in the NBA, in terms of raw production.”

    Perhaps playing in front of his fellow Chinese citizens will drive Yi to excel. He showed signs of life, scoring 19 points and grabbing 9 boards, when more than 100 million Chinese viewers watched his Bucks take on Yao Ming and the Houston Rockets in Houston on November 9, 2007.

    It is interesting to note that for several years Yi has been at the center of a growing controversy regarding his age. Investigative reporters have accused the Guangdong provincial government of conspiring with Yi to falsify his date of birth so he could play in junior competitions. Although his residency permit and passport say that he was born in 1987, other sources indicate that he may have been born in 1984. In 2004, he was listed as being born in 1984 in China's Four Nation Tournament, although authorities later claimed it was only a typo.

    Perhaps the most damning evidence is that the Chinese government is usually unwilling to give official permission to a player to enter the NBA draft unless he is more than 21 years of age -- which is why Yao Ming (dob: September 12, 1980) had to wait until 2002 to declare his eligibility. If Yi really was born in 1987 it would mean he was only 20 when he entered the draft in 2007. Regardless, these questions probably wouldn’t matter as much if Yi could silence his critics with an Olympic-caliber performance on the court.