Basketball is the one sport in which height plays a huge role. Some of the biggest players in the league have also been physical giants, with the average height in the NBA well over the 6 feet mark. Here are the five most extraordinary tall players who made significant impacts in NBA history:
1. Gheorghe Muresan (7’7″)
Out of all the NBA players he was the tallest man ever measuring 2.31m tall making him an unbeatable force on the basketball court. According to Dunkest, he scored 9.8 points per game and got 6.4 rebounds per game playing for the Washington Bullets and New Jersey Nets. Perhaps his best season was 1995-1996 because it was the year that he was awarded the NBA Most Improved Player.
2. Manute Bol (7’7″)
Bol, with a height of 2.31m, was indeed popular for his great block timing. In Olympic basketball, he recorded 397 blocks, which made him achieve the highest record of the rookie with 80 pairs of games, where he was making 4.96 blocks per game.
3. Yao Ming (7’6″)
Yao Ming of China was the Houston Rockets from the year 2002 to the year 2011. Who else but a 9,196 career point man, a hall of famer, who placed international basketball at a much higher level of an international sport?
4. Shawn Bradley (7’6″)
Aside from his conspicuous appearance in the “Space Jam” movie, Bradley was a defensive force to reckon with. In 1996, he recorded 288 blocks, which was the highest in the NBA, proving that being tall could prove useful.
5. Mark Eaton (7’4″)
Eaton as a player for the Utah Jazz in 1984-85 set a record for the highest single-season blocks with 456, a record average of 5.56 blocks per game as per Olympics.
They were all tall, but height can only take you up to a point, and these players displayed a range of other skills as well, apart from being physically gifted.
