Hyperbole Hall of Fame

All of the guys listed at the top of the post played significant parts of their careers as Lakers. Karl Malone and Gary Payton were briefly Lakers, too, but not when they were forces of nature.

Besides, on actual height, as opposed to listed height, Mark Eaton who was in the middle for the Jazz from 1982 to 1993 may well have been taller than Bol. I remember seeing Eaton, who was listed as 7’4", IIRC, standing next to Ralph Sampson, who also was officially 7’4". Sampson’s height was legit, based on how he measured up to his teammate Olajuwan and other big men in the league. Standing next to Eaton, Sampson appeared to be about 6" shorter.

Jordan and Chamberlain both averaged 30.1 points per game over the course of their NBA careers. Jordan’s highest single-season average was 37.1 in 1986-87; Chamberlain had four full seasons in which his scoring average exceeded Jordan’s highest single-season scoring average, including one year (1961-62) when he averaged 50.4 points a game.

Depending on your point of view, Chamberlain either suffered from or benefited from being a contemporary of Bill Russell. In the smaller NBA of the time, specific team match-ups came around much more frequently than they do in today’s 30-team league. Russell and Chamberlain played each other often, and on the stats sheet, Chamberlain was the lop-sided winner. But Russell was surrounded by those Celtic teams of the 50s and 60s that won the NBA title year after year, and therefore was portrayed as the better team player; and as Chamberlain was a full hand taller than Russell, and much beefier, the sporting press worked the David vs. Goliath story line to death; Chamberlain was War Admiral to Russell’s Seabiscuit. That made Chamberlain, who was very intelligent and hyper-sensitive, work all the harder to prove that he was not just a big bully, but a skilled athlete.

In the second half of his career Chamberlain decided quite deliberately to respond to critics who claimed that he was a one-dimensional scoring freak, so for two seasons — his last two years in Philadelphia — he averaged 8.2 assists per game, passing up easy shots that he could take on his own, which cost him about 12 points a game in his own scoring average. After he went to the Lakers, he decided that mere scoring was boring, and decided to become the best defensive stopper in the league, which he (of course) accomplished for five seasons, and his scoring average dropped — voluntarily, because he still had the ability to score at will when a game was on the line — as he concentrated on blocks and steals.

(Chamberlain was also — pretty much indisputably — the greatest volleyball player of all time.)

E"M"J agrees with you — but thinks that you are several orders of magnitude too subdued in your understated adulation.