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The San Antonio Spurs won this year’s lottery and took Victor Wembanyana of course. The 7-4 (whatever) young star is expected to become a great player.
In the modern era, big men are discounted if they don’t have a complete set of skills which really changes the game. A couple of decades ago, other than Don Nelson’s eccentric lineups, small ball was not even considered.
The truth though is that there just aren’t that many great big men today. That was not the case in the 1980’s and ‘90’s when lots of big men roamed the paint: Patrick Ewing, an aging but still deadly Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O’Neal and David Robinson and Hakeem Olajuwon.
Robinson was a brilliant talent who came out of nowhere to become a truly great big man. Yet as great as he was, no one could fully handle Olajuwon as we see in this clip from the 1995 Western Conference Finals.
Olajuwon was perhaps the most agile big man in the history of basketball. He could do things that no one had dreamed of. At his peak, he was a match for any big man in the history of the game, with the possible exception of Wilt Chamberlain in his prime. Watch as he takes Robinson apart, something that Robinson, who was pretty agile himself, simply couldn’t stop.
There’s also a weird cameo here that some of you will like and some will hate.
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