Mick Kupchak broke down in tears today as Yao Ming signed a 5-year, $75 million contract with the Houston Rockets. But this isn’t about Mitch Kupchak at all. Yao Ming is one of the best centers in basketball (mostly a reflection of the declining quality of centers in the NBA), and now he’s paid as such. Just looking at an NBA salary list, Yao Ming’s average annual salary of 15 million would rank fourth next season, just behind Kevin Garnett. Is Yao Ming as good as Kevin Garnett? The answer right now is no, but to be fair, they play different positions.

Despite his lack of game-changing ability, the Rockets had to lock Yao Ming into a big deal. If he had made it to the free market, someone would have paid him more. Why pay so much money to someone who didn’t even average a double double last season? There are a variety of factors:

1. Zydrunas Ilgauskas got paid. When a good borderline center like Ilgauskas charges 11 million per year, it increases the salaries of other centers. Thus, you end up with the real good centers like Yao Ming wanting a lot more than that.

2. Salaries across the board are up this offseason. Teams like the Bucks had a lot of cash and didn’t have good players to spend it on, so they did the following. They gave away money to players like Michael Redd (I never thought a pure shooter who wasn’t too good at shooting last year could make 15 million each, but I was wrong). With Redd’s ridiculously inflated deal, the players (and their agents) decided they should also earn much more than their skills dictated. Before you knew it, Antoine Walker was making 9 million over 6(!) years, and that was said to be a reasonable deal.

3. Who else is there? If the Rockets let Yao Ming go, who would they put in the middle? The only living fossil in the world, Dikembe Mutumbo? The NBA lacks good centers. Yao Ming is in the top 4 or 5 centers in the league, depending on whether you want to call Amare Stoudemire a center. Sure his 18-8-1 pales in comparison to Garnett’s 22-13.5-6, but at least he’s a center. Seriously, all tall people (basketball skill not required) should call themselves centers and find an NBA version of Drew Rosenhaus to get them jobs. I can already see it.

4. He makes a ridiculous amount of money for the Rockets franchise. The Chinese market has been open to the Rockets since they drafted Yao Ming. His games have been televised and have been selling merchandise, among other things. Since there are 1.2 billion people in China, there is a lot of potential money to be made. If the Rockets released Yao Ming, all this would be gone. This is not a reason on the court, but it is just as important. Sports franchises are, after all, businesses.

So essentially, even though he’s not and may never be an inside force like Shaq or the Alonzo Mourning of yore, Yao Ming is still a very good center, and most of all, he’s important to the Rockets franchise. He will be a cornerstone of this team for years to come, and he will be a perennial star in the West.