21st century peaks Ep 13 | The mind-blowing value of gravity

Thinking Basketball

Sports

4.8 • 964 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2025

⏱️ 98 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For our final two players, we quantify the unique and devastating forms of “gravity” in basketball. In particular, off-ball gravity that is essentially missing from the box score and traditional NBA stats or measurements, the strongest interior force of the century and what happens to a team with a mega gravitational force running around the entire court. Support at www.patreon.com/thinkingbasketball

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Thinking Basketball Podcast. My name is Ben. Welcome back to episode 13 of the best peaks of the
0:15.8	21st century. I don't remember what we call this series anymore. We're talking about the
0:19.5	great player seasons of the
0:21.2	21st century. It's both fun and challenging and gets everybody mad and this episode today is going to
0:27.1	be the maddest of them all as we talk about gravity. Cody, that's what I would like to discuss
0:34.2	today. Gravity. Like the, uh, the sci-fi movie from the mid-2010s, we ranking like mid-2010 sci-fi movies. That would be a great episode. That's the peaks I want to talk about next summer. Wait, that's not what we're doing. George Clooney and Sandra Bullock were in that one, right? I think so, yeah. Because then you can talk about them. You could talk about the Martian. obviously interstellar is number one but you know I think that's the conversation
0:57.5	we could have today Yeah, because then you can talk about them. You could talk about the Martian. Obviously, Interstellar is number one.
0:55.5	But, you know, I think that's the conversation we could have today.
1:00.2	You know who had a lot of gravity was the Shaquille O'Neal.
1:05.2	Yeah.
1:06.1	But it's something we don't think about a lot because Shaq was a big man and we did not have the
1:13.7	term gravity back when he played. I think this is an important thing to point out that we did
1:20.5	not have a great way to describe occupying and pulling defenders toward you for a very long time.
1:26.5	We had other languages that we tried to use.
1:28.6	I had, you know, weird terms for it and things like that. And then one day as a community,
1:33.3	I actually don't know who coined this first, but it started to become popular, of course,
1:39.2	a number of years ago with Steph Curry and this idea of having a gravitational pull
1:43.8	away from the basket. And I want to start with Shaq and this idea of having a gravitational pull away from the basket.
1:45.2	And I want to start with Shaq and talk about his gravity because it's very unique in that he would draw defenders toward him near the hoop who would then not want to leave him and just be like, no, leaving Shaquille O'Neal for
2:02.2	rebounds or lobs or anything just sounds scary. And this is a very kind of unique gravitational
2:08.3	pull that he had on defenses to go with all the other things that we all know and love about
2:13.2	Shaq and his power game and his post position and his spins and his lobs and his dunks and
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Thinking Basketball, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Thinking Basketball and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.