The twin tower approach to winning the NBA championship has worked before, but it’s not a foolproof plan. Many have tried, many have failed. Only a few teams have successfully pulled it off, and only one has achieved multiple titles.
You can’t just send out two tall guys; they need to be great players and stand seven feet tall (or be just a hair shorter, at least according to their listed height).
Houston drafted Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon in back-to-back years in 1983-84. They made it to the NBA Finals in 1986, but lost in their only appearance together.
San Antonio drafted Tim Duncan to pair with David Robinson in 1997, and they won two titles together in 1999 and 2003. San Antonio should have had to play another set of twin towers for their first championship in 1999, as the New York Knicks drafted Marcus Camby to pair with Patrick Ewing. Although the Knicks made it to the finals to face the Spurs, Ewing injured his Achilles in the conference finals and was not available for a historic battle of giants.
The Lakers took advantage of the twin towers approach to win a title in 2010, using Andrew Bynum at center and Pau Gasol to overwhelm opposing big men.
The Celtics employed a tall person-only approach in 2024, featuring Al Horford and Kristaps Porzingis, and won their first title since 2008.
Those are the ones that succeeded, and the NBA has been around a long time. Having a seven-foot player used to be a significant luxury for one of your best players, but now it’s almost too common.
Portland is slated to start next season with as many as three players over seven feet tall, and may have something in mind that has only been done once before.
It might be time for a repeat of the triple towers.
In 1999, the Dallas Mavericks had a starting frontcourt of 7’6” Shawn Bradley, paired with seven-foot forwards Chris Anstey and Dirk Nowitzki. Most teams with an elite center struggle to find elite forwards to pair with them, let alone two additional really good tall players to make this work. But there is a chance we could see it again.
Oklahoma City got close with three players starting at 6’10 “or 6’11”, but no one over seven feet tall.
It’s been decades; maybe it’s time for another triple-tower appearance in the NBA.
Portland traded for seven-foot center Deandre Ayton two years ago, drafted 7’2” center Donovan Clingan last year, and this week drafted 7’1” center Yang Hansen.
They could literally be the monstars if all three guys can stay healthy and the two kids turn out to be good. The funny thing about the monstars is they only had two guys at or above seven feet.
How would a team defend that? They can’t just go get an elite big man off the street, and usually, guys that have shorter arms or bodies can’t play as hard as guys who can block out the sun if they stand too close to the basket. It would be like a more athletic and physical version of the 1986 Celtics, who rotated Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, and Bill Walton on opposing teams. It would be like having The Chief with a bigger Chief and an even bigger Chief.
That’s equally amazing and terrifying.
Teams could still shoot from long range, but with Jrue Holiday added to the lineup to work alongside Matisse Thybulle, you now have two guys who can keep that from happening as often. Teams like to shoot threes in the modern game, but what if they had no choice? What if the easy baskets were gone?
That would be a nightmare for some teams, but in Portland, it would be a new world the NBA has not seen before. They might even need to build a new stadium to fit all the championship banners that the team could win.
We are getting ahead of ourselves. The conventional wisdom would tell us that the team is unlikely to keep three seven-foot players on the roster, and that one of them will be traded or sent to the G League, but what if? What if they did keep all three, and they could play at the same time?
It would be wild, to say the least. I haven’t seen anything like that, you haven’t seen anything like that, no one has seen anything like that. The alternative dimension between us and Looneyland hasn’t even seen something like that.
There may come a day in the future when extremely athletic seven-foot players are so familiar that they take up most or all of the starting lineup. Still, today they are the rarest players on the court, so seeing more than one is fantastic, and seeing three at once would be an epic experience fans haven’t been able to witness in almost three decades.
If Portland can’t have the most well-rounded team, they can at least have the tallest. Bring on the triple towers.
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