The Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat are competing in the NBA Finals right now, and there are four players involved who have appeared in Celebrity English Lessons on English, baby!

Mavs guard JJ Barea, the smallest guy on either team, has been unstoppable all through the Playoffs. His moves under the basket are incredible, and that was the topic of an English lesson we taped with him last season.

I was happy to see Juwan Howard scoring a couple of points in the first game of the series. As one of the oldest players on the Heat, he is there more for his leadership than his scoring. We talked about team work and his college career for a lesson earlier this season.

The Mavs also have Roddy Beaubois, who is recovering from an injury. We hope he can get healthy in time to show off the alley-oop skills he talked about in his English lesson before the Finals are over. Zydrunas Ilgauskas hasn’t appeared in a Finals game for the Heat so far, but it’s good that he’s getting a second chance to win a championship after losing on his last visit to the Finals with the Cavaliers, since his lesson was on second chances.

What team do you support in the Finals this year? Leave a comment or answer our poll question on Facebook.

You may or may not know that Tracy McGrady is huge in China. The anticipation of having the one-time leading scorer of the NBA on the same Rockets team as Yao Ming really excited the fans there. The dream never came to fruition due to injuries, but McGrady remains such a fan favorite that he was almost voted into the All Star game last year despite not having played that season due to injury.

Now McGrady plays for the Detroit Pistons, so we attended their practice planning to talk to him for our Celebrity English Lessons series. But he was unavailable. Who else on the team would have an international angle to discuss?

Luckily, the team’s PR staff suggested Richard “Rip” Hamilton because he had just been to China. I’m really glad we got to talk to him. He got excited as soon as we started talking about China and it seems like he had a really good experience there. He also did a great job teaching the terms “coast to coast” and “run the floor”.

At first, I didn’t recognize the NBA Champion and three-time All-Star without his famous protective mask. Somehow, the mask makes him look a little scary, so I was pleasantly surprised when he was so friendly and eager to talk to us. I suppose the intimidation factor is a bonus for him on the court. You know, in addition to avoiding a repeat of the facial injuries he suffered in the past.

Image: Rip guarding T-Mac before they were teammates. From Reuters.

Carmelo Anthony’s nickname is Melo for obvious reasons. But it works on two levels because he’s famously mellow and easy going. You can see it when you watch him play in the NBA–he doesn’t ever seem to lose his cool and it enables him to do things like make game winning shots with four seconds left.

Sure enough, when we attended a recent Denver Nuggets to talk to Melo about Amazing, the upcoming movie he shot in China last summer, and to add him to our growing list of Celebrity English teachers, he lived up to the name. As I mention in the video, the guy has a lot going on, but seemed really calm and focused stretching and running defensive sets and then laid-back and focused on us when we started talking to him for this English lesson on the slang phrase, “mellow out”.

It’s really interesting to hear that Carmelo doesn’t like his Chinese nickname, Tian Gua (甜瓜), which means “sweet melon.” One commenter on the lesson explains that it came from “his sweet smile, lovely babyface and polite behaviors.” All good ways of gaining fans in China, but not necessarily intimidating to opponents, I guess.

Last night the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Boston Celtics to win their second NBA Championship in a row. It was also the second for Sasha Vujacic, a point guard from Slovenia who was one of the first NBA players to appear in English, baby!’s celebrity English lessons. He and Kobe Bryant are good friends and they did a lot of celebrating after the victory (as you can see in the photo).

Sasha had a bit of a tough year with some injuries, but in the last few seconds of last night’s game, he made two free throws to secure the victory. Bu could he ever really have missed? He is of course, “The Machine.” Here’s the English, baby! lesson in which he explains the meaning of his nickname.

After the game, lots of reporters wanted to talk to Sasha about the free throws. This article has a video that shows his post game interview. It sounds like he will enjoy his summer!

The Phoenix Suns were here in Portland to play against the Trailblazers in the first round of the NBA Playoffs. I had approached some of them about doing celebrity English lessons for English, baby!, but hadn’t heard back. I figured they were probably too busy staying focused.

But then one of my friends posted on facebook that the Suns were hanging out at Grand Central Bowl. This was very exciting news because it’s just across the river from our office and we know it’s OK to film there–we shot some scenes for the beginning and end of our Winter Olympic videos there.

Everyone was gone for the day from the office, so I sent a taxi for Devan at her house. Normally she just acts in our lessons, but she was the only person available to hold the camera! On the way over to Grand Central, I made a plan to have Channing Frye introduce me to Steve Nash so I could interview him. I came up with some questions.

The facebook post made it seem like the whole team was at the bowling alley. I pictured them bowling against each other in small teams. But when we arrived, we found there were only a few players, Amar’e Stoudemire, Jason Richardson, and Jared Dudley watching the NBA Playoffs on TV.

Quickly, I had to come up with new questions for each. After gathering some courage, I walked up to Amar’e, explained who I was, and asked if he’d like to do an interview. He was nice as he declined, saying, “Nah, I’m good.” Jared overheard me explaining to Amar’e that English, baby! gets a lot of traffic in China.

“How much traffic do you have in China?” Jared asked.

I told him and gave him my card.

“I’ll hit you up sometime,” he said.

“Oh come on, let’s do an interview right now.” I replied.

He agreed. But as we began to set up, I realized that in my hurry to get to the bowling alley to catch the Suns, I forgot to put a tape in the camera! Jared said he was going to hang out and watch the rest of the game (Milwaukee was playing Atlanta). So we ran back to the office and came back. He was still there, and still happy to be interviewed, thank goodness! What a good guy. And what a good interview too. He’s a natural on camera. No wonder he makes daily videos and posts them to his twitter account. He even let Devan get a picture with him, which you see above. Without further ado, the interview video. You can see the whole lesson here.

Our most recent English lesson with an NBA player is Channing Frye teaching the term “breakthrough.” I watched Channing play for the last few years when he was a Portland Trailblazer. And like most people in Portland, I liked him a lot. He fit the city really well–he did public service announcements for green issues and blogged about how much he liked the restaurants. Channing met his wife in Portland and has kept his apartment here after moving to the Phoenix Suns this season.

I remember when I first heard that Channing Frye had hit three threes in one game. I thought, “Good for him!” But then I heard the same thing about the next game. And the one after that. It appeared Channing had had a breakthrough!

Although he didn’t see much playing time during his tenure with Portland, when Frye and Suns came to Portland to play the Trailblazers last month, Channing had become a starter. Blazer fans usually boo when the visiting team’s starting lineup is announced, but when Channing’s name was called everyone cheered. He went on to make 5 three-pointers that night! Maybe doing this interview earlier in the day helped him get ready.

There is a 44% chance this shot went in. That’s more than 10% better than ever before in Channing’s professional career!

Channing on his balcony in Portland.

On Friday our latest celebrity lesson–and first with a female athlete–goes live on the home page on Friday (peek at it here). What an honor to get to interview one of the biggest names in the WNBA, Ticha Penicheiro of the Sacramento Monarchs (who was also named Sacramento’s most eligible bachelorette by Forbes).

Ticha studied communications in college and may go into broadcasting following her professional career, so the Portuguese athlete seems pretty much like a native speaker. The lesson is sort of a three-parter with explanations of the terms, “steal,” “assist,” and the phrase “the sky’s the limit.” There were some bits about learning English that got cut, so here’s the rest of the interview.

Jason: Your brother plays basketball, your dad’s a coach. Basketball runs in the family. Does English run in the family?

Ticha: My brother always had American players on his team, and they would always come over to my house, so at a very young age, I was very familiar with the English language. Just like here you take foreign languages in school, a lot of people take Spanish, in Portugal, the majority of the people take English. So it’s something that you learn in school. My mom speaks English and my dad understands more than he speaks, he’s a little shy, and my brother speaks fluently.

Jason: Was a time when you first got here and you were going to Old Dominion that you had to struggle to speak English?

Ticha: In classes it was going too fast at first and I was trying to write everything the professor would say and I quickly realized I couldn’t do that because I couldn’t catch up. A lot of times I would just use a dictionary if there were some words that I didn’t know. We always had tutors and people we could ask questions when we weren’t sure what was going on, but I was just paying a lot of attention in class. I would really focus on everything that the professor would say, I would try to write it down. It wasn’t as easy because, you know, my English was OK but, to be in class with somebody who spoke that fast, it was kind of tough.

And finally, a picture of me with Ticha.