🏀 KuBuckets Archive

Some of you resident NBA fans, lend me a hand.

I just looked at the 2015 NBA all star rosters for east and west.

There is not one 7 footer that played American college basketball listed. The Gasol brothers are the only footers on the All-Star rosters and they played for Barcelona Juco. :-)

Duncan, Cousins, Aldridge, Davis and Griffin--the bigs on the West squad--are 6-10 or 6-11, so they are out.

Bosh and Horford--the bigs on the East--are 6-10 or 6-11 also, so they are out.

So: who might it be?

This lack of domestic footers fascinates me.

@jaybate-1.0

These are the American 7 ft players in the NBA,

Joel Przybilla – 7’1″ - Portland (Minnesota)

Meyers Leonard – 7’1″ - Portland (Illinois)

Spencer Hawes – 7’1″ - LA Clippers (Washington)

Tyson Chandler – 7’1″ - New York (No college)

Brook Lopez - 7'-0" - New Jersey (Stanford)

Robin Lopez - 7'-0" - Portland (Stanford)

There are several other players that are borderline 7 ft. but the ones above are the ones that generally acknowledged to be 7 ft.

@JayHawkFanToo

Thanks. Would you guess any of them are on track to be hall of famers?

@JayHawkFanToo
Always thought Jeff hit 7'.
nope.

!image.jpg ↗

@jaybate-1.0 I guess Shaq maybe--so what's your point? How many 7 footers are there in the general population? And how many of them have the skill and agility to have an impact on an NBA basketball game for a long enough sustained period of time to be considered for the Hall of Fame? Maybe about one every 20 years? Are there some other nations out there who are producing a plethora of Hall of Fame-worthy 7 footers?

Best American Footers

Rik Smit 7'4" was an all star not HOF Dutch not American whoops.

Shawn Bradley 7'6" was the tallest dude in the nba

Brad Daugherty 7' 5 time allstar

Artis Gilmore 7'2" HOF

Robert Parish 7' HOF

Patrick Ewing 7' HOF

David Robinson 7'1" HOF

Wilt Chamberlain 7'1" HOF

Shaquille O'Neil 7'1" HOF

Kareem Abdul Jabar 7'2" HOF

Bill Russell was 6'10"

@jaybate-1.0

"This lack of domestic footers fascinates me."

According to this liberal article we might want to blame our height deficiency on our free enterprise system. It seems we need to be "socialized" at a higher level to make sure every citizen makes enough money to buy better nutritional food.

It is all based on The Netherlands recent spike in height, becoming the world's tallest people. Funny, that contradicts with what I read that Serbian people had spiked to the top.

Why Are the Dutch So Tall? ↗

Gosh... if all this is true you would think the French would tower over all of us with their very socialized government.

Personally... I lived in Holland for two decades. I believe their spike has to do with being a cheese culture. Everyone eats cheese and not the Kraft chemical cheese Americans eat. Probably helps bones spurt in growth a couple more inches. I do miss all the outstanding Dutch cheese. But once again... French cheese is outstanding, too, and they eat a lot of cheese. Perhaps they just drown it down with too much wine, stunting their growth.

Or, by golly, is it just possible that genetics has something to do with it all?

Man, with all this shoeco stuff, I'm surprised they aren't manufacturing 7 footers. You know, paying Joel Embiid to partner up with Brittany Griner ... er, bad example. Not sure she is really a woman ... Partner up with a really tall woman then. All paid for by Nike (or Nika, as we should probably say). Harvesting the next generation of OADs. Coach Cal in the birthing room. Coach K pacing the halls. Nike execs monitoring every move. All hoping the kid has the swoosh birth mark on the back of the neck, and not one with three stripes, which would indicate a genetic mutation. Coach Self obviously in the waiting room, ready to pounce if that occurred. Seems like a Sci-Fi drama waiting to happen.

Sounds like something slave owners did.

If there is a downside to the game of basketball it is how height plays too big a role. We all know height is a huge factor. So many guys that couldn't play junior high basketball are propelled into D1 because they are tall. In some ways they take a lot of potential out of the game.

I wonder what the game would be like if we didn't have goals upright to 10'? Maybe the goals are sideways on a wall like meso ball. Or structured some way where height doesn't help or hinder the play of the game?

I don't think Naismith ever imagined his game to go in this direction and be dominated so much by height.

I also think part of this relates to aggression in our society. So in our favorite pastime, we like to see guys smash a ball down through the hoop as hard as possible, or see a guy get his shot blocked into the 10th row. Never mind that it didn't even win you a possession. "Get that snit out of here!!!" Aggression is a huge part of the game and the entertainment value.

I wonder what aliens will think when they land on our planet 100,000 years from now and discover a postcard showing Wilt stuffing a basketball?

@dylans

"Sounds like something slave owners did."

Or something for Adidas in their Nazi days with Josef Mengele spearheading the program.

@drgnslayr Football is the most popular US sport for a reason. It is also the reason commonly sited as a reason why we are so good at war. Football tactics and war go hand in hand.

Here's a classic [George Carlin's Baseball vs. Football](https://m. ↗

[Link Text](

The four minute mark sums it up if you're in a hurry.

I remember when I was sixteen and was 6'2", the coach gathered us around after the first tryouts and told us that "Some of you won't make the team because you are simply not tall enough." He didn't mention skill or anything else, just height.

@dylans

Love it! Thanks!

@drgnslayr I had a Dutch colleague who said it was due to genetically modified food, as the Dutch are more open to using it than other countries.

@ParisHawk

I don't think so. GMOs have to be labeled as "GMO food" in Holland and most people there fear the impact of GMOs on personal health.

I think the biggest factor is the combination of more people eating a healthier diet and connect that with their genetics.

@ParisHawk Absolutely NO side-effects have ever been proven to occur from eating GMO food. If one single scientific report came out and said it was in the least bit unhealthy all GMOs would be jerked off the shelves so fast its ridiculous.

The GMOs out there are limited in corn over 90% is GMO in the US. Most is just the addition of the Roundup gene. About 40% contains the Bt gene in some form. Bt is a naturally occuring bacteria that attacks the mid-gut of worms.

Soybeans are closer to 100% GMO in the US with the Roundup gene being the main culprit. Next year soybeans will have a Banvel and 2,4-D trait added in some varieties to help battle weed resistance.

About half of Canola is Roundup ready in the US.

I believe there are Roundup ready sugar beets also.

The thing most people don't realize is that Indians have bred corn (more or less what is being done with genetics dual haploid breeding etc. currently in a few years) over thousands of years to go from a grass with black berries on the top. Now corn is a grass plant with yellow grain on ears in the middle of the plant.

Unfortunately the UN-science of ignorant people persists myths of GMO food issues. Take away GMO corn and instead of rich people complaining about GMO's it will be poor people starving instead. The good about that is poor people are rarely in the media, so we won't have to see the suffering without a little effort.

@HighEliteMajor said:

Man, with all this shoeco stuff, I'm surprised they aren't manufacturing 7 footers.

Read up on Yao Ming. There's some pretty interesting stuff about his being a product of an "encouraged" marriage between his biological parents, his mom standing 6'3" and his dad 6'7", and a purported Chinese athletic breeding program bordering on eugenics that attempted to produce athletes with physical properties geared to certain sports.

I wouldn't necessarily take the speculative nature of the stories about Yao's genesis as gospel, but I wouldn't doubt there have been some shenanigans attempted with respect to genetic propensity over the years by Soviet Bloc countries and other Communist entities who were trying to create a superior athlete.

@tis4tim

You know this goes on. Athletes are often separated into same-sport communities and hopes (or pressures) for specific people to come together to propagate. I've heard it in interviews from athletes in these countries in many different sports, from gymnastics to figure skating.

@drgnslayr said:

You know this goes on.

I prefer not to talk in absolutes about topics on which I'm not an expert ... especially on this board of exceptionally knowledgeable individuals, but I'd long suspected as such based on things I've read and witnessed during Olympic coverage. And I'd certainly not quibble with you on the subject, with your having spent time playing professionally overseas and getting a first-hand account of such things.

What's interesting about Yao is he didn't want to play basketball. In fact, according to accounts, he didn't even like the sport in the early going. As with so many totalitarian regimes, though, people have a way of miraculously coming to their senses.

@tis4tim

I never heard stories or had experiences first hand... but there has been plenty of stories come out on this with testimony from the athletes themselves. I have very little trust of media in general, including our own... but often the testimonies were live interviews and conducted in many different countries. Hard to believe it is all false.

I don't think anyone was held at gun point. However, the stories usually went into detail about what kind of pressure they were under (duress) or what kind of financial incentives were used.

And I don't want to slam any particular country.

@HighEliteMajor

Isn't this how "robo-quarterback" Todd Marinovich came to be?

@dylans

Remember Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder?

@jaybate-1.0

Maybe Brook Lopez? He is putting impressive numbers in Jersey when he is healthy...although his name alone might be enough to disqualify him. :)

@JayHawkFanToo A little bit. He shouldn't have said that on air, even if there's truth to it it's too touchy. Slaves often weren't treated as people, but more like cattle. It's terrible and I'm glad I didn't have to live through that era. The modern world with very few slaves (outside of NIKE factories) is much better than it's ever been in man's history.