NBA Top 50: Chris Bosh (No. 11)

FanHouse's Tom Ziller argues his ranking of the top 50 players in the NBA.

Praise be to Bryan Colangelo and Sam Mitchell in turning what had been a sad club into an Eastern contender over the last three years. But harken back to the depths, Toronto's basketball low point: the middle of the 2004-05 season, when Vince Carter sewed himself into a bum suit and the Raps sold him to New Jersey for quite literally nothing. At the time, Chris Bosh was a 20-year-old buck working on building a nascent career of dope 12-foot post moves and slippery activity on the boards. Four years later, today, with Toronto on the precipice of a potential conference finals run, what has changed most in the franchise? It's Bosh, who has asserted himself as one of the biggest stars of today's NBA.


The great thing about Bosh, to me (besides his humor), is that he has more or less physically ignored the pundits who argued he'd never be anything until he bulked up. We hear every summer about this stringbean adding 15 pounds of muscle, or that cat hitting the weights non-stop. Media day has turned into a never-ending stream of "arms like steel cables" and "best shape of my life" chatter. And that's great; conditioning can make or break a career. But the emphasis for bigs is always to add muscle. Get bigger. Get stronger. Beat some fools down. When Bosh came into the league, four of every five talking heads insisted he needed to thicken up to have a chance at stardom. Bosh has improved his body some, sure, but he's still known as one of the leanest forwards in the league. And he seems to be doing just fine.

There isn't a mold all players need to fit inside. There are great thick pivots (Patrick Ewing, Shaquille O'Neal) and there are great slender pivots (Kevin Garnett, Hakeem Olajuwon). The slender ones tend to function with elite skill levels as opposed to brute strength, but the attributes aren't mutually exclusive. (No one would call Shaq or Brad Miller skinny, but they might be the two most deft passers among all current bigs. Charles Barkley was a good ball-handler despite his girth. And Shawn Bradley can attest that thinness and a lack of ball skills can live together, too.) Bosh gets off on offense because of an extraordinary shooting touch and an array of gob-smacking attack moves off the dribble or in the post. He's a bit like Chris Webber in the early part of this decade: you could know exactly what he's about to do when he gets the ball and you still wouldn't be able to stop him. How do you guard him? Most forwards and centers lack the agility to corral him, but anyone smaller can't dream of affecting his smooth jumper. And unlike the other young big man in our Top 15, you can't foul the breath out of him because he doubles as one of the best free throw shooters in the league.

Of course, we have seen all this from CB4 with Rasho Nesterovic as the best post partner he's had. Jermaine O'Neal might need regular refueling, but he demands layman attention in the pivot. If defenses had so much trouble limiting Bosh when they could slack off the other big, how's this going to work when their attention must be split? I'd surmise it's going to work just fine ... for Bosh. Buy futures in this cat.