Paul Sturgess is 7'8!
The golden age
of extremely tall pro basketball players seems to be over. Like,
extremely tall even among the NBA's extremely tall population. In the
'90s, several of the tallest people on the planet played in the NBA, and
in some cases (Manute Bol, Gheorghe Muresan, Shawn Bradley) rather
successfully, but since Yao Ming's retirement, that's no longer true.
The NBA's tallest player is Hasheem Thabeet,
who stands at a downright shrimpy 7'3. That change could be a
combination of several factors — post-Yao realizations that human legs
can only propel so much size, the evolution of the game, or even just a
dearth of truly gigantic young men.
Anyway, what I mean to get at
here is that we've got one. He's not in the NBA and probably won't be,
but he's close by. Paul Sturgess — the Guinness-confirmed tallest pro basketball player on Earth
— is in the NBA D-League playing for the Texas Legends. Sturgess is 26
years old, hails from England, and stands 7 feet, 7.26 inches tall, but
it's customary to round up to 7'8.
Some more things to know about him:
- Sturgess was drafted by the Springfield Armor in 2013, but acquired by the Legends in a trade soon thereafter . He's playing only spot minutes and averaging 0.6 points per game in Texas.
- Sturgess is the second-tallest living Englishman, standing just fractions of an inch below former basketball player Neil Fingleton.
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