Legendary Muggsy
Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues in my mind, is probably one of the most incredible NBA players of all time. At 5’ 3” he played an incredible 14 years in the NBA. 14 years!? The only player under 6’ tall to play longer than Muggsy is 5’ 11” Avery Johnson. Avery has 8” on Muggsy!?
At 5’ 3” tall, Muggsy averaged 7.7 ppg, 2.6 rpg, and 7.6 apg. His 7.6 apg leads all NBA players under 6’ tall. The next closest is Michael Adams a 5’ 10” former all-star, most known for his time with the Denver Nuggets, who averaged 6.4 apg over the course of 11 years.
According to Muggsy, his success comes from putting “heart over height”. Muggsy Bogues, however, is a singular phenomenon. The only other NBA player close to the height-disadvantaged success of Muggsy was 5’ 5” Earl Boykins who also played 14 NBA seasons.
Is the NBA missing out on more Muggsy’s? Are there teams of Earl Boykins out there getting it done?
The Team that Played Below the Rim
While I can point to specific players that competed at a high level of basketball despite being height-disadvantaged, I want to point to a team that overcame a height disadvantage to learn from.
I began my analysis by looking at the NBA. I am still developing my “data analysis chops” but let’s take a look at what I have learned so far. Looking at the 2022-23 NBA Season the regular season standings looked as follows:
Looking at the rosters for all 30 teams, I calculated the average height of their roster and plotted it with how many games their team won. That looks as follows:
It may be hard to tell by looking at player heights in inches, but every single NBA team had a roster that fell between 6’ 5” and 6’ 7” tall. Clearly, no NBA team has truly embraced the “small ball” lineups that they claim.
There were only TWO teams in 2022-23 with an average roster height smaller than 6’ 6”. Their average roster height: 6’ 5”. That includes Memphis who had two players that rarely played: 5’ 9” Jacob Gilyard and 6’ 0” Kennedy Chandler.
The standard deviation for height (in inches) among the 30 teams is 0.41909 or a little less than 1/2”. The average height of NBA rosters is virtually identical!
Filing an Appeal
With clear evidence that no GM in the modern NBA was willing to risk their job on exclusively drafting and signing players under 6’ 6”, I decided to file an appeal. The “NBA District Court of Appeals” must have one franchise that has tried to field a team of rag-tag undersized unappreciated underdogs!
For now, though, while I wait back to hear from the “NBA District Court of Appeals” I will turn to the organization that we all love to hate- the NCAA. Surely, there is some 1-win Division 1 basketball team that majorly outperformed expectations with their roster of 5’ 10” kids from the suburbs!
While I have not completed collecting data on every NCAA men’s basketball team from the 2023-24 season. The results so far (including 22 out of 363 Division 1 teams) are as follows:
It’s really hard to tell without filling out the remaining data points that fall in the range of 10 to 20 wins. There may be a correlation between roster height and wins in the NCAA but there also isn’t a huge variance in average roster heights once again. Our low end team, VMI, had an average height of 6’ 3” and on the high end there wasn’t a roster much above 6’ 6”.
Blast! Foiled again! Where are all of the forward-thinking college coaches willing to take a risk and bet on the more competitive talent-pool that being short allows them to draw from? It appears that they aren’t in NCAA Division 1.
Shortness Springs Eternal
While this week’s analysis didn’t produce any low-hanging fruit, I promise that the war has just begun. Somewhere bunkered down in a foxhole with an M224 mortar is a team that said, “Let’s be honest- we are never going to win playing this game the same way everyone else does, we need to be creative, we need to be innovative, we need short people!”
Alas, I will have to speak with my attorney and file another appeal. Perhaps the international court of appeals will perform better, or maybe I will have to look into the dark abyss that is high school basketball **shivers**. We’ll see….
Training Update
This week I wanted to talk about fat-shaming. Specifically, I want to shame all of you fat fatties with your big fannies filling your fat faces with fatty fatty fats!
*gasp* “Cameron, how could you!?”
Maybe I came across a little harsh, what I meant to say is “You are perfect just the way you are, but unfortunately your vertical jump may never rise above the inch that you need to grab the cookie jar off of the top shelf of the cupboard.”
All kidding aside, one of the first phrases I learned after beginning to train with THP Strength was, “Fat don’t fly.” Jumping high is about propelling your body into the air with as much force as you possibly can. This means that the greater your strength to bodyweight ratio (specifically with regards to lower body strength), the higher you will be able to jump (to an extent- there are other factors such as rate of force development and elasticity but you get the point).
In John Evan’s (THP Strength founder) notes on nutrition he says,
“ For jumping athletes, I have found body compositions between 4% and 8.5% to be most advantageous for maintaining high specific mass force and offsetting the incidences of injuries. Most of the elite athletes I have worked with fall somewhere in this range.”
*Breaking News Intro*
“That’s right folks we are here with some breaking news, we just discovered the already thin and sickly looking Cameron Lambert needs to lose even MORE weight in order to be able to jump higher. We will keep you updated as the situation progresses. Back to you Bob.”
I would definitely not consider myself to be in bad shape. On the contrary, I think that I am currently the strongest I have ever been. When I really started lifting weights this past August, I saw a lot of gains. I was also trying to diet according to advice from Jacob Hillier, founder of Jump Manual. This meant I was taking a lot of protein, but otherwise not monitoring diet much.
The result of that was I felt strong and also got to my heaviest weight I have ever measured: 180 lbs. I looked up formulas about what calorie intake to use to drop weight safely, and the result was that I needed to eat about 2000 calories daily. Since February 6th, I started tracking my calorie intake inconsistently. The goal was to lose about 1 lb per week until I can reach about 10% body fat.
I had been dropping weight fairly well, but then committed to tracking EVERYTHING for two weeks straight (3/11 to 3/24) to get a baseline idea of how I needed to eat so that I could then use my mental energy on other things.
A day of eating for me now looks about like this:
Breakfast
Protein shake (1 scoop)- 1g fat, 24g protein, 3g carbs
(4 5.5 oz cans) V8, Original- 0g fat, 4g protein, 24g carbs
Lunch
1 1/2 servings of leftovers (whatever my wife was kind enough to plan and prepare)
Pre-Workout
Protein shake (1 scoop)- 1g fat, 24g protein, 3g carbs
Post-Workout
Protein shake (1 scoop)- 1g fat, 24g protein, 3g carbs
Dinner
1 1/2 servings of an amazing dinner (planned and prepared by my awesome wife)
I certainly could improve getting more protein from food instead of using protein drinks (I would also prefer to go away from V8 but it’s free at work and there’s no added sugar), but it was the easiest and most affordable way for me to increase my protein intake.
To not belabor all the details of what percentage of my 2000 calories I want from carbs vs. proteins vs. fats, I will just say this: it is working. I started at 180 lbs. After 8 weeks, I am measuring 173.4 lbs. I have lost about 7 lbs. and I don’t appear to be losing muscle mass which is the danger of trying to drop too much weight too fast. I am feeling good and getting bouncier everyday!
Here are my jumps for the week! (Note: I overdid it last week and hurt my shoulder. To preserve my shoulder I didn’t do full arm swings on these jumps- it was encouraging to see that I think I was still jumping higher!)
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