Sit back, son, and let me tell you about a basketball time that once existed.
They once roamed the courts of the NBA—big, lumbering, slow moving beasts. A shooting range of six feet, tops. Unless you wanted to play four-on-five, you’d spend half of the 24-second clock waiting for them to take their place on the block.
Their space was the black hole of the game—if you tossed the ball into it, there it would disappear, until it reappeared in the form of a slam dunk or a “bunny.”
They came from schools like UCLA and Centenary and Georgetown and St. Bonaventure. They were all 6′11″ and weighed 240 pounds and wore size 20 sneakers. None of them could shoot free throws.
These were the “big men” of the NBA. They became an endangered species sometime in the mid-1980s and now they’re just about extinct.
One of the greatest of these behemoths, Wilt Chamberlain, was thought of so little by his coach when it came to Wilt’s lack of mobility that Butch van Breda Kolff said, “If the basketball court was made of grass, Wilt would wear out a one-square foot patch.”
They stopped breeding those type of b ...
Read Full Article at Bleacher Report - NBA
Article written by Greg Eno
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