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"The National Basketball Association has two standards of officiating: one for the league as a whole, and another for me, Wilt Chamberlain."
BUT UNLESS the referees begin to apply the rules the same for all, said Chamberlain, "I'm not going to develop my full scoring potential and team value, and the Warriors are not going to beat out the Boston Celtics for the Eastern Divisional championship of the NBA."
The referees reasoning, as Chamberlain sees it, for allowing illegal zone defense to be used against him: "From a flat-footed stance, Chamberlain can reach 9 feet 6. He can make a standing jump 3 feet nine. At the top of his jump he can reach 13 feet 3, or 3 feet 3 above the upper edge of the basket rim. So we've got to give the defense more than average leeway to cope with him."
- February 15, 1960.
Earl Strom, the legendary referee who is no longer with us, said this a number of times: he said if we call all the fouls on Wilt, we wouldn't have a game, so there were two sets of rules for Wilt when he played."
-Sonny Hill
Jordan spoke passionately. If teams were able to play zone defenses, he said, he never would have had the career he did.
- April 1, 2001
When somebody was that dominant, the first thing that people say is that he didn't play against anybody. That wasn't the case. It was a very physical game, much more physical than it is today. You had no three-point line, so defenses were completely crowded in the lane and there wasn't a lot of movement. The league has made it easier to score. Looking back at who he was as a player, I feel like he could have scored more in this day and age.
- August 28, 2023.
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You see, with the new rules, which all slant to help the offense as they call fouls, though today you know Shaq gets away with what I would consider murder."
-Wilt Chamberlain