If there’s ever been a basketball player who was born in the wrong era, it might be Ralph Sampson. The Hall-of-Famer still had a legendary career, especially in college, but with his size and skills, he could have been an absolute monster in today’s game. Before there was Victor Wembanyama, there was Sampson.
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Sampson’s NBA career was derailed by injuries, but when he was healthy early in his career, he was something to see, especially when paired with a young Hakeem Olajuwon in a devastating twin towers kind of lineup. That’s two of the most skilled big men ever to play the game, sharing the court in their early 20s.
Sampson was a guest on the most recent episode of All the Smoke with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, and he talked about what it was like playing with Olajuwon in those early days.
“We knew of each other, we bonded the first couple of months,” he said. “Go to lunch, hang out a little bit on the road, we looked after each other … We may have played against each other in practice twice, but we had to build that bond to play.”
Sampson had just won the NBA Rookie of the Year award when Olajuwon arrived the next season, and together, the two of them shared a common goal that helped them deepen their relationship. “We start playing against Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar], and everybody wants to kill Kareem,” he said.
Sampson explained how Olajuwon would get matched up with the Lakers Hall-of-Famer, while he would get Kurt Rambis or whoever was playing power forward for the Lakers at the time. “I said, ‘OK, you hold him up, and I’ll block the score.'”
Kareem was already the NBA’s all-time leading scorer at that point, so although Sampson and Olajuwon’s plan worked sometimes, it wasn’t foolproof. Still, it helped the two of them strengthen their bond. “We knew that if I’m out, he’s back, and he knew if I’m back, he’s out, and I got his back. So that started kind of jam. We had it down for a while.”
Sampson and Hakeem were only teammates for two years and change before Sampson was traded to the Warriors less than two months into the 1987-88 season. They did reach the NBA Finals in 1986, where they took the Celtics, considered to be one of the greatest NBA teams ever assembled, to six games.
Basketball fans were deprived of seeing a longer partnership from these two incredible bigs, but they still reside in history as arguably the greatest twin towers the NBA has ever seen. Asked by Stephen Jackson, who once played with David Robinson and Tim Duncan on the Spurs, which twin towers would win in a head-to-head matchup, Sampson brought the house down with his response.
“David Robinson’s still having nightmares [over that matchup],” he laughed as Jackson roared and dapped him up. Sampson said he “loved David to death,” but we know who he thinks would come out on top.
