The tallest woman basketball player is too big for the WNBA.
What if there was a woman basketball player who made NBA players look small? I’m talking bigger than Joel Embiid. We might be used to tall 7 footers in men’s basketball. Currently we’re seeing Bob an Marjanovic, 7’ 4” Wembanyama, but in the WNBA.
If you check the Guinness book of world records, the current tallest woman in the world is Rumeysa Gelgi who is 7 foot 0.7 inches and then there is her, Ziyu, a 7 foot 3 inch basketball player from China. This doesn’t even look real.
Yes that makes her the tallest woman in the world, taller than the tallest WNBA player ever, and she’s 17 and wants to make the WNBA.
In fact Ziyu would be taller than the average WNBA player by over a foot and 3 inches. That’s the equivalent to a 7 foot 9 NBA player. So taller than Yao Ming and you already know that everyone calling her the female Yao Ming.
A woman who is taller than Shaq needs more shine than this and we got to see her play in the Olympics.
And yes she can dunk. In 6th grade, Ziyu was already 6’ 9”. Taller than LeBron at 12. Both her parents were professional basketball players so it runs in the family.
Even though Ziyu towers over everyone, her posture seems to also be normal, something that again, we’ve seen the demise of the tallest men’s basketball players have back issues.
And in the under 18 Asia Cup, Zhang led the Chinese team to the finals and pretty much was unstoppable. She scored 36 points and 13 rebounds in 22 minutes against New Zealand, 44 points and 14 rebounds against Japan. These are exactly the type of numbers I would envision if you told me there was a 7’ 3” women basketball player.** She’s literally the woman Wilt Chamberlain.
Watching the tape, Ziyu is able to get wherever she wants on the court, she has enough weight and strength to push pretty much every player off their spot. There is no player that comes remotely close to blocking her shot or even bothering her.
After watching several interviews, off the court, Ziyu seems to be humble, calls herself a shy girl, coaches have nothing but praise, and she is focused on making the best of her abilities. but on the court, she is aggressive, wants the ball, directing teammates, just not yelling like Russell Westbrook.
Throughout the entire cup, she was the best player, to the point that China was being called a one person team. And unfortunately China would lose in the finals to Australia, but fortunately for us, that means we got to see Ziyu face really good team defense and have to give it her all.
Australia played fast to make sure Ziyu wasn’t set up in her defense because when she did, Australia had to play good team ball to get around her. It’s just that they were kinda able to get to anywhere they wanted on the court so maybe the rest of China’s team wasn’t doing the best to deny them the ball.