Basketball - Good Things Come In Small Packages

Earl Boykins, Milwaukee Bucks’ guard, is quite a novelty at the NBA. He is just a 5 foot 5 basketball player which is full of 7 foot centers and 6 foot 11 forwards. Boykins is a legitimate NBA point guard and has know to create quite a lot of problems for the opposing team’s defence.

At 5 foot 5, Boykins is one of the shortest players in history of NBA. The other was Muggsy Bogues who was 5 foot 3. Boykins weighs 133 pounds. Boykins is also shorter than another short guard Spud Webb. Webb was 5 foot 7 and was popular in the 80s and 90s when he played for Atlanta Hawks and Sacramento Kings.

However, Boykins says that Spud and Muggsy were not his inspiration. His inspiration was his father, who was a basketball player and he wanted to be better than his father. He said that Muggsy and Spud just made his entry into NBA easy.

However, the road for Boykins was not easy specially since he was a 5 foot 5 guard trying to make it to the NBA. Even though Boykins was the country’s second highest scorer with 25.7 points per game during his senior year, Boykins was undrafted out of Eastern Michigan.

Boykins started his professional career in 1997 when he started playing basketball for Rockford Lightning of the Continental Basketball Association. From there, he went on to play for New Jersey, Cleveland, Orlando and Los Angeles Clipper in his initial years in the NBA.

However, he got his first break in the true sense in 2002 – 2003 season with Golden State when he played 68 games. He played the last three seasons with Denver Nuggets before he was traded to the Milwaukee Bucks.