Kai Sotto, surely, has what it takes to make it to the National Basketball Association (NBA). As the person tasked to tend the middle, he is perfect because at 7-foot-2, he is tailor-fit for that post. With that ceiling, he can dominate. As the saying goes in basketball: “Height is might.”
The beauty in Sotto is, he may still gain two more inches in height. He is only 18 years old (born May 11, 2002) and, if we go by biological anatomy, males usually stop growing at ages between 20 and 21.
I tell you, he is not your typical freak of nature.
Kai’s father, Ervin, 39, is 6-foot-7. Ervin was the Purefoods’s seventh pick in the 2004 Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) Draft, when Kai was four years old.
Ervin would play in four more PBA teams—Shell, Barangay Ginebra, Air 21 and Alaska—before retiring as a Petron Blaze player in 2012 after being a part of the Alaska squad that won the 2010 PBA Fiesta Conference crown.
And Kai’s height did not only come from his father because Kai’s mother, Pamela, is 6-foot-flat, making the kid a bonafide engineering marvel of nature.
But lest we get carried away that easily, Kai Sotto, we must remember, is a project in the making.
Thank his stars that he is being handled, seemingly, very well by his dad, who has marshalled his son’s moves every step of the way in guiding Kai’s dream to become the first homegrown Filipino to make it to the NBA. Already, Kai is in the G League Select Team, a prestigious farm landscape in the NBA.
“Kai is young... it’s just a matter of putting in that work every day,” said NBA G League coach Brian Shaw, who has mentored such NBA legends as Pau Gasol and Shaquille O’Neal, both seven-footers.
“From the film I’ve watched on him, Kai looks like he can shoot from the outside. He can be a facilitator.”
A shifty lefty, Kai is even ambidexrous.
The last 7-foot-2 NBA star was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who won six titles—five with the Lakers—and remains the NBA’s all-time leading scorer ahead of Karl Malone, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan in that order.
In Jabbar, Kai has a Mt. Everest to scale. A benchmark worth embracing.