To the NBA and the wider world, the Trail Blazers' selection of little-known Chinese center Yang Hansen with the No. 16 overall pick was the most shocking, out-of-left-field move of Wednesday's first round of the draft. Maybe of any draft this century.
To them, though, it was the culmination of two years' worth of clandestine legwork and an incredibly involved, rigorous group effort in evaluation.
Yang first came on the Blazers' radar in June of 2023 when general manager Joe Cronin sent his France-based international scout, Nico Mathieu, to Hungary for the FIBA Under-19 World Cup. Like every other NBA scout in attendance, Mathieu was there to get eyes on France's Alex Sarr (last year's No. 2 overall pick) and players like Asa Newell and Tre Johnson that ultimately became first-round picks last night.
The Chinese national team wasn't much of a thought going into the tournament. Despite being a nation of over a billion people, with a rabid basketball culture and more NBA fans than the entire size of the population of the United States, China hasn't produced any great NBA players outside of Yao Ming. Only eight Chinese-born players have ever made it to the NBA, and the country hasn't had a player picked in the first round since Yi Jianlian in 2007.
But Yang, who was about to turn 18, caught Mathieu's eye with an uncommon feel and playmaking ability for someone his size. He held his own in a head-to-head matchup against Sarr when China played France, and he also played well against Spain and the U.S. Mathieu told his bosses of his discovery, and the Blazers' scouting department began seeking out film.
"I had my inbox flooded with videos and highlights and things that were intriguing with someone I had never heard of," says assistant general manager Mike Schmitz.
It's not often that a prospect gets by Schmitz. Cronin hired him three years ago after he'd spent the previous decade covering the draft on the media side for outlets including DraftExpress, Yahoo and ESPN. In that time, he built a reputation as one of the most respected and well-connected draft analysts in the industry, with a particularly deep Rolodex and knowledge of the international game.
But China is something of a black box for even the most dedicated talent evaluators. Game film is hard to come by, and the CCP-controlled Chinese Basketball Association is not particularly accommodating or transparent to outsiders. Even traveling there in a team capacity is much more logistically challenging than most other countries that NBA scouts typically visit.
Still, the Blazers liked what little they had seen of Yang enough to make it an all-hands-on-deck effort to learn more about him. They started a secret Slack channel called "Project Hansen" and instructed their scouting, analytics and health-and-performance departments to gather as much intel as they could.
They also began planning a trip for Schmitz and fellow assistant GM Sergi Oliva to watch Yang play in person with his CBA team, the Qingdao Eagles, which involved months of negotiating with the Chinese government.
There were two unrealized connections that helped them get that scouting trip across the finish line. One was Blazers backup center Duop Reath, who is South Sudanese by birth but grew up in Australia and has played all over the world in a long and winding basketball career. His last international stop before landing with the Blazers in 2023 was a season in the CBA with Qingdao, where he overlapped with Yang. Reath was on the senior team and Yang was on the junior team, but they still practiced and scrimmaged with and against each other, so Reath was able to provide insight to the Blazers brass and a strong recommendation that they give Yang a look.
Even more instrumental was Pooh Jeter, who serves dual roles in the organization as one of Chauncey Billups' player-development coaches and as the assistant general manager of the Blazers' G League team, the Rip City Remix. The list of stops on Jeter's 17-year playing career is even longer and more varied than Reath's. It includes a four-year stint in the CBA with the Shandong Lions, who play in Jinan, not far from the town of Zibo in the Shandong province, where Yang grew up. Jeter still knew enough people in the area that he was able to help the front office make the necessary contacts to arrange the trip.
Schmitz and Oliva spent eight days in China in December of 2023, attending multiple Eagles games, spending time with Yang and talking to the American-born players playing with and against him. His teammates and opponents uniformly raved about his work ethic, unselfish play style and competitiveness. The two Blazers executives came away from the trip with the same feeling Mathieu had: there was something there worth watching.
"His IQ and feel for the game shows up in different ways, but it probably shows up most in his passing," Schmitz says. "He can really facilitate and make others better. That's really exciting when you project him out long-term. This is a guy who wants to get other players involved. He wants the ball to move. He wants to find open cutters. He gets just as much joy out of throwing a backdoor pass to a cutting teammate or throwing a lob as he does from getting a dunk or scoring on the block."
Yang decided against declaring for the NBA draft last year, opting to play another season in Qingdao instead. After winning Rookie of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year in the 2023-24 season, he was named an All-Star and All-CBA Domestic First Team selection for the second time this year. The Blazers continued to watch his growth, and spent more time with him last month at the predraft combine in Chicago.
By then, Yang was on other teams' radars as well. He'd played with a Chinese All-Star team at NBA Summer League in Las Vegas last July, and in May had one of the most impressive combine showings of any prospect outside the lottery. For the Blazers, it was an encouraging sign that he could hold his own against progressively stiffer levels of competition.
"Being able to see him in different settings was a big deal," Schmitz says. "[The U-19 World Cup] gives you a baseline of seeing at the same age and the same development level, this is where he stacks up. Then you go to the CBA, and there are either former NBA players or former big-time college players that were his teammates or he played against. Being able to see him against those caliber of players, and then getting him at the combine and seeing him against someone who played at Michigan or Kentucky, you're able to say, 'This is what he looks like against guys who are projected first-round picks.'"
The same week as the combine, the Blazers failed to move up into the top four of the draft lottery. With no Cooper Flagg or Dylan Harper in their future, they moved forward with bringing in multiple projected lottery picks for in-person workouts at their practice facility in Tualatin. They did due diligence on prospects like Carter Bryant, Asa Newell, Kasparas Jakučionis, Egor Demin and Collin Murray-Boyles, but none of them emerged in the Blazers' minds as a higher-upside pick than Yang.
This was cemented when the they hosted Yang in one of their first post-lottery workouts on May 29. The session also included Newell, Rasheer Fleming, Jase Richardson, Liam McNeeley and Will Riley—all projected late lottery or mid-first round prospects. Yang held up well in the workout, but the team was particularly impressed by his interview, even though he had to use a translator.
"His translator was translating what the coaching staff was saying, and he's got to pick it all up on the fly and go through a drill in a different filter," Schmitz says. "He was able to process it all without having to stop. We did film breakdowns with him both here and at the combine, and he's able to communicate what he's seeing, even while not speaking perfect English."
On draft night, the Blazers traded back with Memphis from No. 11 to No. 16, picking up a 2028 first-round pick and two future second-round picks as the Grizzlies were motivated to move up to land Washington State forward Cedric Coward. Cronin wasn't confident in Yang still being on the board if they traded back much further than that; he'd also worked out with Minnesota (picking 17th) and Brooklyn (holding the 19th and 22nd picks), and both teams were said to be high on him. And so they took him at 16, in one of the most surprising NBA draft picks in recent memory.
"The goal was to get as far back as possible," Cronin said after the draft. "We didn't want to 'overdraft' if we didn't have to. We didn't feel much more comfortable going beyond 16. We decided to do what some would call a 'reach' and take that swing, and 'overdraft' technically, a player we really value. It shows what we thought of him."
In the 24 hours since they made the pick, public reaction has not been kind. In the post-draft grades, the Blazers got D's from The Ringer and SB Nation, a C from CBS Sports, and a D- from NBC Sports. The Athletic and The Washington Post both included the Blazers and the Yang pick in their "Losers" category. On its own, drafting a long-term project like Yang is at odds with the Anfernee Simons-Jrue Holiday trade they made earlier this week, a clear win-now move. Add in the fact that the Blazers drafted another center, Donovan Clingan, with the No. 7 overall pick a year ago and still have Deandre Ayton and Robert Williams III on the roster, and it's not hard to see why people have questions about the direction of the franchise and the thinking behind this pick.
The more pressing questions: How ready is Yang to be an immediate contributor on a team that, by all other indications, wants to go for the playoffs next year?
And how, exactly, will Yang and Clingan work together, if they do at all?
"I think they're a great complement for each other," Schmitz says. "They're both connectors, but they do it in different ways. Donovan does it with his defense and the way he protects the rim. He's emerging as a top defensive center in the NBA, and offensively there's a lot more that he's continuing to tap into. With Hansen, he brings a little bit of a different element. He's a little more offense-oriented and can create a little bit for himself.
"Is there a world where they play together? That's more of a question for Chauncey and his coaching staff."
Whether Yang pans out or not, there's something to be said for an organization trusting its scouting and evaluation and having the confidence to go off the board to make a pick like this knowing it will be unpopular in the short term. You can't accuse the Blazers of not doing their homework before pulling the trigger on a draft pick as unorthodox as this one.
"We want our fans to be excited about what we're building and where we're headed," Cronin said on Wednesday night, hours after he stunned the league by taking Yang. "What the big picture's going to look like. What next season's going to look like. That's important to us. In times when you make what some would deem a 'questionable' move, you'd hope that they trust that we're doing our best to make the best decisions for this club, and the fans will be patient with what we're trying to achieve."
Sean Highkin
