YouTube Gold: Hakeem Olajuwon And An Interesting Hypothetical

What would the Dream do with Victor Wembanyama?

The game of basketball has moved towards the idea of a positionless game. Pitt coach and Duke alum Jeff Capel says the only position left is point guard.

Of course, people in the 1980’s witnessed Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and then Scottie Pippen and Charles Barkley. All four players defied easy positional typecasting and that was decades ago.

But as Jay Bilas said a while ago, and this is certainly not an exact quote, it’s a big man’s game. If you are taller and have skills, you’re probably more valuable than someone who is smaller.

Today we are in the dawn of the Age of Wembanyana as the 7-3 French teenager brings a package of a shotblocker with guard skills.

Positionless ball or whatever you call it, there is always going to be room for a dominant big man. Take Hakeem “the Dream” Olajuwon.

For a man who is 7-0 tall and played at 255, Olajuwon was powerful and dazzlingly quick. He played against other big guys like David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan, Robert Parish and others, and while some were stronger, none could begin to keep up with his moves inside.

And while a three point shooter is nice, it’s still a relatively low percentage shot for most people - although not former Blue Devil Luke Kennard, who hit nearly 50 percent of his attempts last season.

Still, if you got Olajuwon the ball inside, he had an excellent chance of scoring and, like young Wembanyana, was a major challenge defensively.

Wembanyama is taking the game into strange new places, but no one would ever turn down a player with Olajuwon’s skill set. Imagine this for a second: do you think for a minute that Wembanyama could follow Olajuwon through a series of his classic spins and shakes? He’s going to be great, but if Olajuwon were playing today, he’d destroy Wembanyama because while the presumptive Rookie of the Year knows how to use his length brilliantly, his footwork would be completely exposed by Olajuwon, who remains, by far, the quickest big man who ever played the game.