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Interesting facts about height (talks about Hakeem and Yao)

Discussion in 'NBA Draft' started by Zacatecas, Jun 10, 2005.

  1. Zacatecas

    Zacatecas Member

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    Didn't know where to post this. Therefore put this on the Draft because it will give ya'll a better idea of some facts about height. It is rather interesting.

    http://www.isteve.com/2003_NBA_Height_Spreading_Globally.htm


    The NBA All-Star Weekend has become a sort of World Festival of Height featuring the inordinately tall from all over the Earth. The Houston Rockets' Yao Ming, the Western Conference's 7'5" starting center in Sunday's All-Star Game, exemplifies more than just the increasingly global reach of NBA talent scouts. He also illustrates a general trend in which stereotypically short peoples, such as the Chinese, have been sprouting upward in average height.

    Overall, of course, Yao is not exactly representative of China's 1.3 billion people. His 6'-7" father and 6'-3" mother both played for China's national basketball teams. Even so, the number of Chinese 7-footers has been growing as the Chinese people have become more prosperous and taller.

    Stephen Morgan, an economics professor at the University of Melbourne, found that the average Chinese 17-year-old boy was 2.7 inches taller in 1995 than in 1955. The diet of the average Chinese child, especially in the cities and along the coast, improved dramatically after free market reforms began in 1978.

    In contrast, "Americans have not grown (in height) in 25 years," noted Richard Steckel, an Ohio State economist and anthropologist. Economic historians who study changes in average stature call themselves "auxologists." They use height data to augment better-known economic measures of well-being such as the per-capita gross national product.

    For most of the last two centuries, Americans tended to be strikingly taller than Western Europeans, but that is no longer always true. In the wealthy and healthy Netherlands, young men now average just over 6 feet. That's about 2 inches more than their American counterparts.

    Tall Dutchmen are generally less interested in basketball than in volleyball (in which the Dutch won the gold medal at the 1996 Olympics). Still, the Netherlands did produce 7'-4" Rik Smits, who enjoyed a respectable 12-year career with the Indianapolis Pacers.

    Players from the basketball-crazed Mediterranean countries are also finally starting to make a mark. Although the most lucrative professional leagues outside the United States are in southern Europe, athletes from the Romance language-speaking countries long had little impact in the NBA compared to their rivals from Eastern and Northern Europe, where the typical stature was greater. In the mid-1990s, for instance, Portugal's military conscripts averaged 4 inches shorter than their Dutch counterparts.

    In Saturday's Rookie Challenge preliminary game, though, last year's Rookie of the Year, Pau Gasol, a 7-footer from Spain, is playing for the Sophomores. Emanuel Ginobili of the Spurs, an Argentinian of Italian descent, is on the Rookie team. (San Antonio's Tony Parker might be classed with them because he grew up in France, but his father was an African-American pro basketball player and his mother a Dutch-American model.)

    The Iberian economies, which once lagged far behind the rest of Western Europe, closed much of the gap in recent decades. Infant mortality rates, which correlate negatively with height, had dropped to typical Northern European levels by the mid-1980s, so Steckel expects the height gap to narrow as well.

    Similarly, West Africans are significantly shorter on average than their distant cousins, the much richer African-Americans. (American blacks account for 19 of the 25 All-Stars, vs. zero African players in either the main showcase game or the young players' game.)

    Few Africans have yet done much in the NBA, and most of those who have are big men from Africa's well-nourished middle class. The great Hakeem Olajuwon is the son of the prosperous owner of a cement company. Defensive star Dikembe Mutombo's father was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris. Los Angeles Clippers center Michael Olowokandi is the son of a Nigerian diplomat and was raised in Britain.

    Still, some parts of the globe seem to produce lots of tall people, no matter how bad the conditions. After all, height is influenced not only by environment, but by genetics, as well.

    One of the two tallest players in NBA history was 7'-7" Manute Bol. An illiterate herdsman who once tracked a lion preying on his cattle and killed it with his spear, Bol twice led the NBA in blocked shots.

    Bol is a member of the Dinka tribe of southern Sudan. A higher proportion of extremely tall people are believed to be found among the Dinkas and their neighbors along the Upper Nile than anywhere else on Earth. Bol, for example, says his younger sister is 6'-10."

    Remarkably, the Dinka grow so tall despite numbering among the world's most tragically oppressed peoples. The black southerners, who are Christians and pagans, rebelled against the Muslims from northern Sudan who traditionally captured them for use as slaves. Roughly 2 million people have died in two decades of civil war.

    Within Europe, especially tall people can be found in the gritty ex-communist countries in the Baltic and the Balkan areas.

    In the All-Star Game, Cleveland's 7'-3" Zydrunas Ilgauskas will carry on Lithuania's proud basketball tradition. The heart of the 1988 Soviet Olympic team that beat America for the gold medal was made up not of Russians but of Lithuanians such as 7'-3" Arvydas Sabonis, now with Portland. Lithuania has medalled in all three Olympic basketball tournaments since the tiny country regained its independence from the Soviet empire.

    The other traditional center of European basketball dominance is the mountainous and war-torn Balkans in the southeast. The region will be represented in the All-Star Game by Peja Stojakovic, the 6'-10" Sacramento forward from Serbia. Under its old name of Yugoslavia, Serbia medalled in the 1996 Olympics. Serbia's neighbor and rival Croatia medalled in 1992.

    Europeans tend to grow tallest where the climate is cold but not frigid. Writing in 1965 before the Dutch grew quite so tall, the prominent physical anthropologist Carlton Coon noted, "In mean stature, we find the tallest people in Scotland, Iceland, Scandinavia, the eastern Baltic region, and the Balkans, particularly Montenegro and Albania. In general, the crest of tallest stature runs on the cold side of the winter frost line."

    Coon pointed out that this pattern follows Bergmann's Law, a rule of thumb in biology that states that within a species, animal populations living in the colder parts of the range tend to be larger and heavier than those living in the warmer parts.

    Thus, the tallest Indian tribes in the New World live around the U.S.-Canadian border and in the southern cone of South America. Likewise, the tallest East Asians are found in southern Siberia and northern China, the latter being a region that NBA scouts find particularly interesting.

    In extremely cold climates, however, protruding body parts such as long legs radiate too much heat. So, Eskimos are much less lanky than the Blackfoot Indians on the southern Canadian prairie. Likewise, Russians are not as tall as Lithuanians. Coon noted, "Stature decrease as one approaches northern Norway and the Urals."

    In contrast, the extremely thin Dinkas (NBA trainers could never bulk up Bol enough for him to rebound effectively) have a very high surface-to-volume ratio, which allows body heat to dissipate rapidly in their equatorial climate.

    Height differences, however, cannot explain the most striking aspect of the All-Star rosters: There are 19 African-Americans but only one Euro-American, Indiana center Brad Miller. (In case you were wondering: New Jersey star Jason Kidd has a white mother. Also, Dallas guard Steve Nash is a white Canadian. The other European is German Dirk Nowitzki.)

    The U.S. government's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that blacks and whites are virtually identical in stature, both at the 50th and the 95th percentiles. So, the answer to that famous sports bar bone of contention -- Why are blacks better than whites at basketball? -- must be found somewhere else.
     
  2. MartianMan

    MartianMan Contributing Member

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    Problem with Asians is that even if they are tall, they are usually very, very skinny. And compared to blacks, they aren't as athletic. Thus, all you can hope for is every class of asians have at least one exceptional athlete (e.g. Yao).

    I find it amazing how African Americans differ from Africans in size and athleticism. Say what you will about slavery, but it has helped them athletically for sure.
     
  3. nyquil82

    nyquil82 Contributing Member

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    yeah, you don't see many asians or africans winning many gold medals in the olympics, right?
     
  4. MartianMan

    MartianMan Contributing Member

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    I can see you saying 'asians' but why did you say africans in your reply? I said africans are more athletic.

    Plus, Asians winning in the Olympics is because there are SO many Asians that there will always be some exceptional athletes (e.g. Liu Xiang). Like that one white guy who won the 400meter, i think.
     
  5. nyquil82

    nyquil82 Contributing Member

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    i guess by your logic then is that Lithuanians are the most athletic race because they win many gold medals in proportion to their population, right? But what about Indians? there are over a billion of them, but they don't win many gold medals?

    Also, why are Asian americans larger and more athletic that asians in asia, they aren't even close to as skinny as asians in asia? is it because they were also enslaved at one point? or could it be something like diet, since the american diet has much larger portions of protein? why are second and third generations of african, hispanic and asian immigrants so much larger than their immigrant relatives?

    There's also a strong argument that many african americans are athletic because culturally in the US they are encouranged to be athletes, because a lot of african americans are very poor in this country, they don't stay inside and play video games and instead play sports outside starting at a young age.

    point is, i think you're making a lot of excuses to justify that race determines your athleticism, and while it may in some counts, you're drastically underestimating such things as culture, nurture, diet, sports indoctrination and level of training programs.
     
  6. danielf

    danielf Contributing Member

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    Mostly this is a matter of diet and living conditions. The article more or less says as much; many of the africans who do succeed are from privilaged classes.

    They also have about 15% European ancestry on average. What effect that has I dont know...

    Slavery lasted for only a handful of generations. Not clear how strong selection could of been, or what it may have been for particularly.
     
  7. MartianMan

    MartianMan Contributing Member

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    I never said those factors don't count. Of course they count significantly, but I'm only talking about genetics. You are introducing factors I was not talking about. And I guarantee Indians will win more medals in the future as they move up in the income bracket. Also, even if you look on the playground where little kids play, you'll see that black (African-American) are, on average, more athletic than the other kids. And I doubt those little kids had special training.

    And if you want to get scientific. It's already shown that black people have more fast twitch type II muscle.

    Also, Asians in the US aren't bigger than the Asians in China. Maybe fatter for obvious reasons. But if you go by height, Asians in northern china are way taller than the chinese here in the States.

    Sure, there are many factors in play such as environment and genetics. But as people get better food and better living, environment will play a lessor role and genetics will play a much greater role.

    Also, when you use the phrase "by your logic", you should first understand my logic, which you apparently did not.
     
  8. nyquil82

    nyquil82 Contributing Member

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    so what is it? nature or nurture? you push for nature strongly in one claim with some broad generalities, then you agree with my point that nurture is a much stronger factor.

    also, taller is different from bigger. asians in the US are significantly bigger than those in asia and are also more athletic. then again, if you use your genetics argument, maybe they just aren't known for sports because they are smarter and do well in school and have careers instead.
     
  9. Zacatecas

    Zacatecas Member

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    The article is saying that there are certain people who have genetics that will allow them to be taller. However, not all people reach those potentials because of lack of nurishment or choice of doing something else. People in certain areas of the world are genetically taller. But, people with the tall gene in China, Africa, Europe, etc. may have priorities that differ from playing basketball for a living. Unlike their counterparts in the U.S. if those people fall short, then they are basically screwed for life because a lot of times there might not be government aid or programs to compensate their opportunity cost. Their plan 2 really sucks! And the odds of making the NBA would still be so small! There are 30 team and each have 12 roster spots with 3 for the IR. The odds aren't in their favor either way.

    So, when the genetics, the nurishment, and the heart for the task come together, then you have someone who can compete to play at the top of his game (weather it is basketball, Volleyball, soccer, track and field, etc.) And all things being equal, they will be better at it than the general population! So what the article points out is that if the people in those regions of the world dedicated themselves and had support via the government or via someone else, then their statistical chances of making it to the elite level of competition increase X-fold over the rest of us.

    One time I heard that the reason there aren't any more great heavyweight boxers in the world is beacuse they all wanted to be power forwards in the NBA.

    I think that China will be producing a lot more NBA players in the near future; The government support is there, and beleive me when I say it, basketball is huge out there. Places like in Africa just don't have the infrastructure or support for potential elite athletes. And Eastern Europe still is dominated by soccer, therefore attracting cream of the crop athletes who might have had a career in basketball.

    So, as a moral to this story, if you know your gene pool and you're in the under 6 feet tall group, then any chances are making the NBA are slim to none!!!! Sux :(
     
  10. MartianMan

    MartianMan Contributing Member

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    I never said nature or nurture dominated. I'm saying all things being equal (i guess nurture-wise), genetically blacks are more athletic. If we fed everyone around the world the best foods and had the best environment to train, say 100m race, blacks would account for a larger section of the top 50 runners than their population-size dictates...because of genetics. I'm sure elite Asians and white runners may make it too but blacks will predominate.

    Asians in the US are bigger, somewhat, than Asians in Asia. Obviously, it's because of the vast nourishment differences between Asians here and Asians there. But my whole blacks are ON AVERAGE more athletic argument was based on the premise that everyone was equal in nourishment and environment. I'm not saying Asians can't be more athletic than a black person. What I am saying is that at an average black guy is on average more athletic than an Asian guy. And when I say black, I mean African-American.
     
  11. Zacatecas

    Zacatecas Member

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    Actually this is quite true. Not blacks overall, but WESTERN African origin people have 20 of the top 20 world record times up until a couple of years ago. This might have changed recently, but either way, people from western african origin tend to be amongst the fastest people on EARTH. If you look at the marathoners, the elite come from Eastern Africa. And of the top weight lifters 18 of the top 20 records come from Norther Europeans. As the Article pointed out, through evolution, our genetics conformed to our surroundings.
     
  12. Man

    Man Contributing Member

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    very interesting thread good read :)
     

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