NBA Draft Combine measurements reveal one player wears enormous clown shoes

The NBA Draft Combine started Wednesday in Chicago, and here are all the pre-draft measurements you need and crave.

The measurements they take are pretty reasonable -- weight, standing reach, wingspan, hand length -- but there’s one weird thing: They measure the prospects both in shoes and without shoes.

For starters, we’re not fully clear why the NBA needs to measure both. To find out how tall various players are naturally, measure them without shoes. If you’re interested in finding out how tall they are in their basketball uniform, measure them in shoes. This info seems kind of pointless, because players will change shoes over the course of their athletic career. No other league opts to measure players’ heights in shoes, so far as we can tell. It seems the only benefit finding both serves is to find out how large various players’ shoes are.

But the NBA opts to measure both, and releases them. The data helps us learn that there are no true 7-footers in the draft, only shoed 7-footers. It teaches us most potential NBA players wear shoes between one and two inches. Oklahoma’s TaShawn Thomas wears shoes that are but a flimsy .75 inches thick. Montrezl Harrell of Louisville apparently wears a slip of paper under each foot that boost his height from 6’7 to 6’7.5.

Then there’s Stanford’s Anthony Brown, listed at 6’5.25 without shoes, but 6’8.5 in shoes, apparently wearing 3-inch lifts.

And then there’s Vince Hunter.

You might think that this is just a clerical error -- somebody entered the wrong height -- but we at SB Nation have uncovered shocking and very real photo evidence that Hunter has been deceiving us all along:

NBA teams, do not draft Vince Hunter. He is a fraud. He is not 6’7. He is a tiny child wearing 9-inch tall shoes. He lacks NBA height, and his speed and vertical leap have been ruined by the stilt-like boots he tramps up and down the court in. We’re glad the NBA’s super-logical decision to measure guys both with and without shoes has uncovered this trickery.

★★★

SB Nation presents: You have to see this dunk to believe it