Harry Palmer wrote:Sedale Threatt wrote:Harry Palmer wrote:
Sampson is the only real comp we’ve ever seen, and his career was basically over after 3 seasons. Obviously hoping Wemby doesn’t have the same luck.
Yeah, and while my recollections of Ralph is hazy, I don't ever remember him doing some of the stuff Wembanyama does. Certainly not hitting stepback 3s and sht like that
No, not that, but at least some of that is the game’s evolution; back then C’s almost never took 3s.
Sampson was talked about as having guard skills in his 7-4 frame, and would routinely bring the ball up, lead fast breaks, etc. Wemby’s better, imo, but Sampson playing today would play more like Wemby does. Also Sampson came in older, which is another advantage to Wemby, but Sampson was as anticipated, arguably the most heavily recruited HS player in history, three time college player of the year, and was the SI cover boy 6 times in his 4 year college run.
Imo Olajuwon was much better, but it’s hard to really know because his three seasons went Rookie of the Year, All Star and beating the defending champ Showtime Lakers in their absolute prime and going toe to toe with widely considered one of the goat teams of all time before getting injured in the Finals in the first of a string over the next season after which he was a shadow of himself. But he was talked about as a guy who would revolutionize the game and he and Hakeem were so incredible together that there was a Sporting News cover story asking if the league ought to force a separation for the sake of parity and they were the reason the draft lottery was introduced.
I've watched some game footage of Sampson and I don't think he'd be doing any of these things if he came up today, especially not in the US developmental pipeline which is awful for bigs today. Outside of that Ihink the ability for Wemby to get as low as he can is something I've never seen from anyone his size, there's times where he's going around wings and his shoulder is somehow lower than theirs. The angles he can get to at his size shouldn't be possible, and that's not something you can just teach, by comparison Sampson was more upright. Also, his height was clearly embellished, or was with his shoes on, I've seen pictures of him and Kareem and they look to be the same height.
I don't think there's been anything like Wemby before, there's just no contemporaries for someone this size doing the things he's doing.
