YouTube Gold: The World’s Tallest Basketball Player Is Coming

Basketball, as Jay Bilas likes to say, is a big man’s game.

That’s been true for a long time. George Mikan laid down the law in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, winning five titles in his career. Bill Russell won 11 even as Wilt Chamberlain had epic personal success. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had unprecedented success at UCLA and won multiple titles in the NBA. Hakeem Olajuwon won back-to-back titles with the Houston Rockets.

You could go on but there’s no need.

Despite the recent focus on three point shooting, as Victor Wembanyama underscored this season, a good shooting big man beats a good shooting little man.

We mention this because we detect a bit of anxiety about an incoming freshman at Florida, Olivier Rioux, who is an astounding 7-9.

We’ve heard a couple of people who are actually worried about Rioux’s impact on the game.

Don’t worry too much about that.

Rioux is well proportioned and has some minor technical issues to overcome. Could he become a solid player?

He’ll always be incredibly tall but the odds of him becoming an outstanding player aren’t that great. He just doesn’t have a tremendous amount of athleticism. He could shut down the lane but he can’t shut down threes.

And even if he does, there’s a fairly easy solution: just widen the lane and really enforce lane violations.

They changed the rules for Russell (goaltending), Chamberlain (widened the lane) and Jabbar (killing the dunk in college). They’ll do it for Rioux if it comes to that.

But it almost certainly won’t.