Dubbed the ''Female Shaq'' by her fans, Li Yueru shined in Olympic debut

BEIJING (China) - Li Yueru and China had a decent run in the recent women’s basketball tournament of the Tokyo Olympics. They went undefeated in the Group Phase which included impressive wins over Australia and Belgium before narrowly losing to Serbia in the Quarter-Finals.

At the center of their campaign, was the dominating force that is Li Yueru.

The 22-year-old turned heads with 21 points, 12 rebounds, and 5 assists in China’s first game against Puerto Rico and continued to end up as the team’s most efficient player. In her Olympics debut, Li averaged 14.8 points, 8.3 rebounds, and 2.8 assists per game while missing only 6 of her 28 shot attempts.

Li has been compared by Chinese basketball fans as a female version of Shaquille O’Neal and her increasingly impressive performances over the years have only made those comparisons more and more reasonable.

As the modern netizens might say on social media, the 2.00M (6’7”) Li Yueru is just built different.

At the Olympics, she was the third tallest player in the women’s tournament, only behind teammate Han Xu and USA’s Britney Griner. Li masterfully uses her size to her advantage, as she’s always done throughout her youthful days.

Both of her parents were exceptionally tall, which is why she quickly towered over her classmates at a young age. At the age of 11, Li was already at 1.8M (5’11”).

However, because of her height, Li sometimes felt different and uncomfortable at that age which led her being less lively and cheerful. Her parents identified this as a problem early on and decided that playing basketball could be a way for her to overcome this self-esteem issue.

It turned out to be the right decision as that not only helped young Li out with being confident about her height, it also became her first steps towards a bright basketball future.

Five years after she started playing, Li began asserting her dominance. In her first national team appearance at the FIBA U16 Women’s Asia Championship 2015, Li crushed China’s competition with averages of 22.1 points (led tournament) and 16.1 rebounds per game. In both of her games against Japan which included the title-clinching win, Li poured in a combined 57 points and 40 rebounds.

Moving up to the U18 level, Li continued to shine. At the U18 Women’s Asian Championship 2016 in Bangkok, China won the title again with Li putting in 15.9 points and 13.9 rebounds per contest. There was little that could slow her down, not even in Japan in the championship game where she recorded a 22-point, 23-rebound performance.

Shortly after turning 18, Li then proceeded to make her senior national team debut at Women’s Asia Cup 2017. While China weren’t able to win it all as they had done at the youth level in the previous years, Li still proved to be highly effective even at this level by averaging 17.2 points and 9.3 rebounds per game.

The ball kept rolling as Li was called up to the national team once again to no one’s surprise for the Women’s World Cup in 2018. Playing at the global stage for the first time, Li played her part in helping China advance to the Quarter-Finals with an 18-point, 8-rebound game in a win over Japan.

The cultivation of her success with the national team and at the club level domestically led her to being selected with the 35^th pick in the WNBA draft to the Atlanta Dream.

After all that she’s accomplished at the age of 22, from winning youth national team titles to being among the top 10 in scoring and rebounding at the Olympics, it only seems that the future can only get brighter and brighter for the youngster. When it’s all said and done, Li Yueru might end up being compared to Shaq not only because of their exceptional height, but because of how they dominated and succeeded on the court.

FIBA