Tacko 'Taco' Fall

[Talent Chaser]

7'5" Center from Senegal who is in the c/o 2015. Seems relatively fluid for a guy his size and weighs 250 lbs . Just ridicilous, the guy has an 8 foot wingspan and doesn't need to jump to dunk the ball. Article from Yahoo:

Meet Tacko "Taco" Fall. He's somewhere between 7-foot-4 and 7-5, wears a size 22 shoe and has an 8-foot wingspan. And he's believed to be the tallest prep basketball player in the U.S., if not the world.

"Everywhere I go, people want to take pictures, talk to me, shake my hand, but I'm getting used to it now," the Tavares (Fla.) Liberty Christian Prep junior told the Orlando Sentinel this past November.

Fall arrived in Florida from Dakar, Senegal, via Texas, Ohio and Tennessee with little to no organized basketball experience. Former Orlando Magic center Pat Burke, now running a training facility in the area, helped steer Fall to Liberty Chrisitan through former Auburn University teammate Mamadou N'Diaye, whose brother runs the Flyingstar Academy for soccer and basketball in Senegal.

Upon visiting Liberty Christian coach Paul Archer's home, Fall apparently hit his head on a ceiling fan. Needless to say, he's a basketball project, averaging 11.1 points, 5.0 rebounds and 1.3 blocks for the Lions (11-15) this winter. Fall recorded just one double-double despite standing a half-foot taller than the next-tallest prep baller, fellow Senegalese junior Jean Marc Koumadje of nearby Montverde Academy.

"Everywhere I go, people are going to be scared, because they say I'm 7-4," Fall told the Sentinel. "But if I don't play like a big man, they may not be scared of me. They're going to say, 'This guy is soft.' So, I have to play like a big man, be aggressive on the post, ask for the ball and work on my hook shot.

ESPN just tweeted about Taco which led me to post this thread.
[tweet]https://twitter.com/sportscenter/status/454298022701457411[/tweet]
[tweet]https://twitter.com/247sports/status/454304687999975424[/tweet]
[tweet]https://twitter.com/dimemag/status/454307231442669568[/tweet]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AURnnpiGOxs[/youtube]

[ManualRam]

is there a reason i should be more intrigued by taco than this guy http://espn.go.com/college-sports/baske ... dou-ndiaye ?

[Talent Chaser]

is there a reason i should be more intrigued by taco than this guy http://espn.go.com/college-sports/baske ... dou-ndiaye ?

Tacko looks like he gets up the court quicker and he looks more fluid. He also is only a junior in high school and has more room for growth.

[ManualRam]

sure, more room for growth because he literally just picked up basketball.
idk. i don't find any of these raw 7'4+ players interesting at all.

[Talent Chaser]

sure, more room for growth because he literally just picked up basketball.
idk. i don't find any of these raw 7'4+ players interesting at all.

Couldn't Hibbert be classified as that when he was a freshman? From a grantland article:

Cut to 2004, Hibbert’s first year at Georgetown. In an early fall workout, Hibbert lay prostrate in the weight room, watched by strength coach Mike Hill. He’d hit the ground to bang out a few push-ups, but a problem soon became clear: Hibbert couldn’t do one. So while women’s soccer and lacrosse players looked on, Hill straddled the freshman big man, reached down, and grabbed him by the sides, pulling him up and pushing him down while Hibbert struggled to pitch in. “It was humiliating,” Hibbert says. “All these girls are watching — they can do push-ups but I can’t.” Not only could Hibbert not do a push-up, he couldn’t bend his knees enough to do a single squat, even without holding weights.

That’s not all. “He couldn’t run,” says Boston Celtics forward Jeff Green, who was part of the same Georgetown recruiting class as Hibbert.3 “He was pigeon-toed, and he had these size 18 shoes, so he was just tripping over himself trying to get up and down the court.” (Says Hill: “It was more of a waddle than a run.”) But in the half court, Green says, “he was a load.” Big, with good defensive timing and a soft offensive touch, Hibbert was capable of scoring when he got the ball down low. But this was the Big East, a league stacked with elite athletes. As long as Hibbert was incapable of passing a middle school fitness test, he wouldn’t have an impact.

This shows it is possible to come along way as a big man. Hibbert went from a stiff to anchoring the best defense in the NBA. Rest of the article can be found here.

[ManualRam]

i'm not holding my breath. unless the kids start early, like yao, there seems to be diminishing returns with extreme height. even if this kid looks more mobile than ndiaye, he still looks slow with 0 agility. the nba game isn't built for players like that.

[Marcus]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AURnnpiGOxs[/youtube]

This video is comical.

[HornetJail]

Steve Clifford, Patrick Ewing, and Al Jefferson should coach him up to be the next Manute Bol at least.

[supaflash]

Man if I were him and his coaches, I would have him be doing nothing but agility drills and core work. Constant footwork drills. Get him out on a soccer field and run run, foot speed foot speed, plyo... He's young enough his body should be able to recover and get more agile. The better his legs and core and agility are the better chance he has to make it anywhere and probably live a more comfortable life.

[Tave]

is there a reason i should be more intrigued by taco than this guy http://espn.go.com/college-sports/baske ... dou-ndiaye ?

I can think of three:

1) The specs

2) The specs

3) The specs

[RSCD3_]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AURnnpiGOxs[/youtube]

This video is comical.

Is he The Black George Mikan of legend? :-o:-o



Sent from my SCH-I800 using RealGM Forums mobile app

[bibby1023]

Looks fluid? Are we watching the same video? Seemed to me it took him 5 seconds to gather himself every time he got the ball in the paint just to reach up and dunk it.

[Okada]

I will be surprised if he ever does much of note. I don't care how raw he is, the guy has the ability to dunk and block shots easily by jumping 2 inches off the ground, he should be able to do more at a high school level. Not to mention that a guy that size has a good shot at being injured a lot.

[turtlesnjoi]

He's so slow and has absolutely no skills. Like frighteningly slow and unskilled.

[HornetJail]

more interested in that 7'4 Indian dude