How tall was the tallest NBA player ever, in centimetres?

How to get close to this number

Bound it by human height. The tallest people ever recorded were taller still, but a professional athlete has to be mobile enough to play — which rules out the most extreme cases of the growth conditions behind the all-time records. The playable maximum sits comfortably above a standard door frame but well short of the tallest human ever measured.

The near-tie is the structural clue: two players of very different builds and backgrounds topped out at practically the same height, which suggests a ceiling rather than a coincidence. Above this height the joint and cardiovascular load makes competitive sport impractical, so the record is a physiological limit rather than a record waiting to be broken.

The biographical detail in the explanation is the one worth keeping: one of the two grew up herding cattle and was discovered in his late teens with no formal basketball background. Extreme physical outliers are found rather than developed, and the scouting story is a reminder of how much of elite sport is a search problem.