A “once in a lifetime” player? Hubie Brown has seen a few. Brown has dedicated most of his 90 years to basketball: playing in college and a peripheral pro league, filling up whiteboards at every level of coaching, rhapsodizing over post-ups and pick-and-rolls as an announcer.

“I think of Bill Russell, I think of [Hakeem] Olajuwon, Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar],” Brown said in a recent interview, and continued a partial list of the giants who lived up to gigantic expectations: Wilt Chamberlain, Moses Malone, Shaquille O’Neal.