will basketball as we know it exist with exposure to africa

[rollie mass]

just looked up tribes in africa and there are tribes where women are 6ft and men 7 ft and an ethopian tribe that was 12 foot-my daughter is 6ft and her boyfriend a 6-6 rugby player and  my wife  5-11, my son hit 6-5 as a point quard-
glad the league is going small ball,a dunk is no longer a dunk,maybe make court wider,longer and raise basket a bit-make speed and skill a priority-long live isiah

[Chris22]

I don't know about your OP, but I do think the court should be widened. The players are so much bigger and faster than they used to be.

[M.A.]

I'd like to think so. The world needs an alternative to soccer, and I think basketball provides that more than American Football.

[hpantazo]

I think a big part of the reason the NBA game went to small ball is that the rules , and they way they are enforced, just kept being adjusted to force it to go this way for the purpose of increasing high paced scoring and shooting for entertainment. Stan Van Gundy alluded to this a number of times when he was coaching Dwight Howard in Orlando. The league kept adjusting the rules to allow defenders to get away with more when guarding big men in the post.

Another contributing factor imo is that the league lost many of the top big men prospects, like Greg Oden, Yao Ming, Andrew Bynum, etc. It will be interesting to see if the era of big men returns with the new crop coming up, like Anthony Davis, Andre Drummond, Towns, Okafor, maybe Embiid, or if the league will continue to adjust rules to inhibit low post scoring and promote shooting and fast paced small ball style of play.

Long term, as the rest of the world catches up to the NBA, which they already are, the NBA may have to adjust their style of play to keep pace, as international play highlights fundamentals and teamwork much more, and shooting, which is probably another reason why the NBA pushed their style to small ball already. If you look at recent team USA lineups, they really had no use for guys like Drummond or Dwight Howard. When you have players coming up in international teams like Porzingis who are 7 ft and shoot threes and run the floor while their teams move the ball well, you have to adjust, you can't have guys out there that can't shoot outside the paint, require the ball a lot in the post, and clog up the middle. The US teams had issues with this and with iso basketball in a few past tournaments (see the squad with Lebron, Wade, Dight Howard, and Melo that lost to Greece in the 2006 Worlds a while back, and the 2004 captain Iverson team USA with Lebron, Melo, Wade, and Duncan) before the NBA rules and style were tweaked and the past few squads have adjusted and done extremely well. 

[LatterDayCelticsfan]

just looked up tribes in africa and there are tribes where women are 6ft and men 7 ft and an ethopian tribe that was 12 foot-my daughter is 6ft and her boyfriend a 6-6 rugby player and  my wife  5-11, my son hit 6-5 as a point quard-
glad the league is going small ball,a dunk is no longer a dunk,maybe make court wider,longer and raise basket a bit-make speed and skill a priority-long live isiah

Which Africa are we talking about here?? I certainly have never heard of 12 foot Ethiopians, and those areour neighbours.

[freshinthehouse]

I don't know about your OP, but I do think the court should be widened. The players are so much bigger and faster than they used to be.

I could roll with this.  I think widening the court would really help open up the half court game. Or they could just go back to making zone defense illegal.  Either option would really help half court basketball, specifically post offense.  Right now it is too easy for perimeter defenders to sanEdited.  Profanity and masked profanity are against forum rules and may result in discipline. on D and still be able to recover on the perimeter if the post player kicks it out.

[freshinthehouse]

just looked up tribes in africa and there are tribes where women are 6ft and men 7 ft and an ethopian tribe that was 12 foot-my daughter is 6ft and her boyfriend a 6-6 rugby player and  my wife  5-11, my son hit 6-5 as a point quard-
glad the league is going small ball,a dunk is no longer a dunk,maybe make court wider,longer and raise basket a bit-make speed and skill a priority-long live isiah

I for one welcome our new 12 foot tall Ethiopian overlords.

[KeepRondo]

just looked up tribes in africa and there are tribes where women are 6ft and men 7 ft and an ethopian tribe that was 12 foot-my daughter is 6ft and her boyfriend a 6-6 rugby player and  my wife  5-11, my son hit 6-5 as a point quard-
glad the league is going small ball,a dunk is no longer a dunk,maybe make court wider,longer and raise basket a bit-make speed and skill a priority-long live isiah

Which Africa are we talking about here?? I certainly have never heard of 12 foot Ethiopians, and those areour neighbours.

maybe standing reach 16 feet

[knuckleballer]

I had no idea African tribes were so tall.   . They aren't.  Some are a little taller than the average... I don't know... European tribes?  Seriously, no one, no tribe is as tall as you point out.  I'll ignore the 12 ft comment, there is no group, no small group of people any where in the world where 7' men and 6' women is anywhere close to normal.

Don't let me dissuade you though, I love most of the threads you create. I mean that for real, you are an asset here.  You just swung and missed on this one.

[LarBrd33]

Once you get to a certain height, isn't it exceptionally difficult to be functional?   There's some people over 8 feet tall, but aren't a lot of them on crutches?  As far as I know, there's no record of anyone over 9 feet tall... and most of the people over 8 feet have growth deformities. 

Hard to find guys over 7 feet who are mobile enough to play basketball.

[knuckleballer]

Edit: double post

[rollie mass]

I had no idea African tribes were so tall.   . They aren't.  Some are a little taller than the average... I don't know... European tribes?  Seriously, no one, no tribe is as tall as you point out.  I'll ignore the 12 ft comment, there is no group, no small group of people any where in the world where 7' men and 6' women is anywhere close to normal.

Don't let me dissuade you though, I love most of the threads you create. I mean that for real, you are an asset here.  You just swung and missed on this one.

sorry but i googled it and i was just as shocked- netherlands is one of the tallest average height as a nation-i must have misread it somehow--time to back track-again sorry-

[Roy H.]

Regardless of fictional 12 foot tall giants, Africa has largely untapped potential for basketball.  There are a lot of barriers:

1.  Lack of exposure;
2.  Dominance of soccer;
3.  Lack of resources and opportunities;
4.  Poverty / health

However, if some of those challenges could be overcome, there's no reason to think that Africa couldn't become a hotbed of NBA prospects.  If, say, basketball could be as ingrained in the culture of urban Africa to the same degree that it is in urban America, or as engrained as baseball is in Latin America, there's no reason that African prospects couldn't eventually stand on equal footing with Americans.

[rollie mass]

 well it was in print and first thing i read after googling tall tribes in africa-the 12ft was also there but credited from some ancient historian as i read further but several sites had 6ft women and 7ft men -

[winstonkirk]

The OP's numbers are wrong. Norther Europeans are the tallest. The average height in the Netherlands, and Denmark too I think, is over 6 feet. In general the colder the climate the bigger the animals are who develop there. There is a nutrition component too, which is why people with African genes in the US are taller than those in Africa on average.

The height discrepancies have been going down over time. Now the difference between Northern and Southern Europe is only a couple inches. Back in the days of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire the difference between "Germans" and southerners was around 7 inches and more than 50 pounds.

Africa has huge potential for players, but it will be limited by relative poverty, nutrition and disease. West Africa, the part with the best raw potential for prospects, is also the part with the most problems. Increased exposure to basketball will take a long-time to show real progress. I suspect these problems are why the NBA is pushing more in Southern Africa, which doesn't have as many problems as other parts. Enough wealth exists for clubs so prospect can be identified and funneled toward local development.