HOUSTON—Reports from several NBA teams indicate that cheap, flimsy Chinese basketball players frequently break down and fall apart when faced with the normal wear-and-tear of an NBA season. "We got one a couple years ago, but the foot broke," said Rockets GM Carroll Dawson about Chinese center Yao Ming. "Now it just sits there. We don't even use it anymore." Said Bucks guard Michael Redd: "It was fun playing with Yi Jianlian for the first few weeks, but then it seemed like every time we got too rough, he stopped working and we had to get him fixed. Maybe we just got a crummy one." Some NBA GMs, however, claim that it is still worth it to buy Chinese players, as European players remain expensive and many domestic models are unreliable, unrefined, and occasionally malfunction and shoot someone.