China Says It Has A 7'4 14-Year-Old Girl Who's Dominating The U15 Level
There are dominant performances on the basketball court and then there's the effort recently turned in by 7-foot-4, 14-year-old Zhang Ziyu out of East China's Shandong Province. She's becoming a massive international sensation after putting up 42 points, 25 rebounds and blocking six shots in her team's championship win at a big travel ball tournament.
Chinese news outlet Global Times notes that at 7'4, Ziyu is as tall as Yao Ming. The haters will say she should be playing against women her own size, but when you have a Yao Ming clone walking around it's tough to find travel ball competition for Ziyu.
Let's get to the highlights and see if you can spot any weaknesses in her game:
Observations on Ziyu's skills:
• The short game is good to go. She knows what to do at the rim...
• ...but shouldn't she be dunking at 7'4"? I need to see her flush some one-handers...
• She knows how to use glass
• I don't know who's coaching the red team, but the girls should be ordered to put a body on Ziyu. Box her out! Throw a hip into her knees. This is terrible coaching.
• I need to see her free throw shot because she'd be shooting a ton of them, especially if my team started hacking away at her legs. I'm talking forearms to the back of the thighs. Chop the legs and the tree is coming down.
The Global Times notes that Ziyu was 5'3 in first grade and was 6'9 in sixth grade. The good news for Ziyu is that both of her parents were professional basketball players and her father is 6'10 while her mother is 6'5.
What's the next step for this future superstar? Dunking. I need her hanging from rims. I need her screaming in the face of 15-year-olds after a two-handed flush. If we're going to get crazy here, I want Ziyu to turn into a trash-talking Chinese machine who ends up running through the WNBA winning every award and putting the WNBA wokes into a huge international pretzel. Do they speak out on the trash-talking Chinese woman and risk the wrath of LeBron who refuses to lose a single dollar to the Chinese market or do the WNBA wokes fall in line and take it for the betterment of their paychecks.
2030 in the WNBA should be real interesting.