Birth of the Giants
November of 1946 was the beginning of an era for the sport of basketball. The Basketball Association of America began their first season of professional basketball . That initial season saw eleven teams battle it out for supremacy and the business of putting a ball in a hoop began to take flight.
It was already clear in 1946 that height mattered. The league’s best team in the regular season featured “Jumping Joe” Fulks, a 6’ 5” forward out of Kentucky. He averaged 23.2 points per game in a season where teams averaged 68 points.
A Tall Task
Even though Joe Fulks stood 6’ 5”, his team, the Philadelphia Warriors, were actually the smallest team in the league by average height. You can see all of the teams organized from shortest to tallest (left to right) below:
I would first like to note how awesome the team names and logos were. The name Toronto Huskies just seem much more fitting to me than Toronto Raptors. I am sure not all the team names would be smiled upon in our modern era (I’m looking at you St. Louis Bombers), but I still can’t help but think that I would love to find some Providence Steamroller or Pittsburgh Ironmen memorabilia.
It’s interesting to pore over the rosters and see how tall basketball players were, even in the 1940s. The Toronto Huskies and St. Louis Bombers both employed the services of 7’ 1” Ralph Siewert out of Dakota Wesleyan University during their season, and the New York Knicks had 6’ 10” Bob Cluggish of Kentucky. Even in these early days of basketball, the rosters were filled with players who stood 6’ or taller.
Growth Spurt
For those that remember, in an earlier post I compared the win-loss records of NBA teams from the 2022-23 season to their average roster height. The average team height that year? 6’ 6” tall. The average team height in 1946-47? 6’ 2” tall.
While I don’t have good data to reference, I don’t think the average height of an adult male has increased by four inches in the past seventy years (if it has, I will willingly eat my humble pie). It seems that as basketball’s popularity grew, more and more of our long-femured friends discovered that the drawback of always being asked to grab the jar off the top shelf came with the advantage of making it easier to put that ball in that hoop.
Just like that, an era of tall tales and taller men had begun.
Training
I guess I can call myself a jumper now.
I have been training to dunk for the past 17 months. During that time, I have gradually progressed, but have also been navigating injuries. Regular readers know that my recent injuries have been: 1. shin splints, and 2. strained AC (shoulder) joints.
After discussing my continued shin pain, the trainer I am working with, John Evans, asked me to send him a video of me walking towards and away from a camera to analyze my gait. His response was quick and unequivocal:
“You’re feet are H*LLAH pronated. You have flat feet and overpronation. No wonder your shins feel like sh*t. You will need to experiment with some inserts but they will need to be extremely stiff.”
With that, I was off to the lab to find me some inserts! A quick googley-doo lead me to: TreadLabs. I looked over some other possibilities but nothing indicated to me it would better for the price, so $150 later some new inserts showed up at my door.
This is not a paid promotion (if only it was). The difference when I put in the inserts was IMMEDIATELY noticeable. I feel like my shins are finally coming back to full strength. I have been able to stay off my feet more, and am hopeful I can start working sprint work or single-leg jumping into my program at some point soon.
I wish the story ended there, with rainbows and butterflies on the horizon as I skip my way into a 360 tomahawk dunk. However, two weeks ago, on Saturday, June 1, 2024 I noticed some pain in my left knee during my jump session. My right knee began experiencing it as well.
It is not uncommon for jumpers to experience knee pain, and after consulting the greater knowledge of the THP community (the training group I am working with), it seemed clear that I have begun to develop Patellar Tendinopathy also called “jumper’s knee”. The essence of the injury is that, tendons like muscles, break down but can repair and become stronger. Tendons, however, take much longer to develop than the muscles they connect to. After repeated jumping and lower body work my patellar tendons (which connect my kneecaps to my shin bones) have not been able to get the necessary rest to grow back stronger.
All this means I need to do additional load management to give those patellar tendons a chance to get stronger! Hooray for load management! It also means that I can call myself a jumper! If I have jumper’s knee that must be true, right? Woohoo!
Seeing my improvement over these past few months has been so encouraging, making the emergence of these injuries difficult. I am learning a lot about what my body can handle, and one of my biggest lessons has been one of patience. As a kid, I believed athletic performance was just shear effort and “mind over matter”. I am now discovering that I need to trust my process and let the pain guide me. It turns out it is only through hard work COUPLED with appropriate rest and recovery that progress really occurs.
We are one week to dunk camp and I have totally accepted that I may not dunk next week. I may not even be able to fully participate in all the activities, but that’s okay because I know that recovery is a huge part of the process. Maybe I can keep progressing towards a dunk at Dunk Camp 2025. Who knows though? Maybe after a week of deload I will jump higher than I could have imagined. I will let the pain guide the way.
Happy jumping everyone! (Note: Sorry I did not get some of my jump videos on this post. I have had to figure out some changes hardware and software, but I hope to have stuff back up on our next post!)