YouTube Gold: Little Man Is Making A Name In Pre-Season NBA Basketball
Yuki Kawamura is doing some amazing things right now
We’ve gotten used to seeing Japanese baseball players in the Majors and this season, in fact, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers became the first player ever to enter the 50/50 club - 50 homers and 50 stolen bases. Did we mention he’s a pitcher?
The guy is a phenomenal talent.
But basketball has never produced that much talent in Japan. Rui Hachimura is in the NBA but he’s about it. He’s also 6-8.
At 5-8, Yuki Kawamura is a full foot shorter, but he’s making some real waves with Memphis in the preseason.
One of the myths about Asian basketball is that there are no great point guards there because - how to put this kindly - Americans tend to think the kids spend all their time studying and they can’t get out and be creative on the court. They don’t have the time.
Apparently this doesn’t apply to bigger players or something. Thinking in stereotypes means you have to periodically make unpleasant accommodations for reality.
Kawamura clearly made the time. He is a tremendously creative passer as you’ll see in this video.
Some of these passes are just gorgeous and the mark of a great passer, as we’ve said before, is that he sees things that others do not. You can see a guy getting ready to dunk and that’s obvious. You can see a block coming. You can see a team heading downhill on a break and you know pretty much what’s about to happen.
You can’t see stuff like this ahead of time though. Great passing makes people jump out of their seats like nothing else because it’s totally unpredictable. And it’s contagious, as we saw this season with Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever.
Kawamura is a truly brilliant passer. Just as importantly, he’s absolutely fearless. Keep in mind that he’s 5-8. It’s very unusual for a guy that size to be on an NBA court, much less to be making plays like he’s making.
Can he stick?
It’s hard to say. His size is a disadvantage, unless he can flip it a la Muggsy Bogues. But he’s got heart and a huge imagination. And that’s hard to rule out.
By the way, if you were wondering when the first Japanese player or player of Japanese descent arrived in the NBA, get ready to have your mind blown: it was in 1947 and the player was Wat Misaka, out of Utah.
A 5-7 guard, he played college ball during World War II, which must have been incredibly difficult, and later played for the New York Knicks for one season. He was the first non-white player in the history of the league.