SHAQUILLE O’NEAL, Allen Iverson, Tom Izzo and modern-day basketball pioneers Yao Ming and Sheryl Swoopes were elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2016 on Monday.

    Longtime Chicago Bulls owner and chairman Jerry Reinsdorf will be enshrined and posthumous inductees are NBA referee Darrell Garretson, John McLendon, the first African-American coach in professional basketball, and former stars Zelmo Beaty and Cumberland Posey.

    Yao, the No. 1 overall pick in 2002 of the Houston Rockets, is recognized as much for opening the door to international stars as his statistics.

    His career ended early because of foot injuries but he averaged 19 points, 9.2 rebounds and 1.9 blocks per game in eight seasons.

    From 2003 to 2007, Yao was arguably the best center in basketball, trading elbows with O’Neal and Tim Duncan for that claim. He twice led all centers in Player Efficiency Rating (PER), and was top five amongst all centers in PER from 2003 to 2009.

    Yao became the first international player picked first overall without playing college basketball in the U.S.

    By virtue of his nationality, he became the NBA’s bridge into China, a sports-mad country that other major North American sports leagues had yet to stake a legitimate claim in. Yao’s stardom and success in the NBA unlocked a country of over a billion people boasting 300 million basketball playing citizens, according to the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA), which the NBA had been trying to crack since opening its first offices in Hong Kong in 1990. When NBA China, the league’s Chinese subsidiary, received a US$253 million investment from Disney and a few Chinese investment firms in 2008, it was valued at US$2.3 billion.

    About 200 million Chinese people watched the Rockets when they had television access to Yao’s games, according to ESPN. (That’s more viewers than the latest Super Bowl had!)

    Currently, NBA basketball is the No. 1 sport in China on social media.(SD-Agencies)