15 best NCAA basketball players we wish played in the Twitter era

4. Best NCAA basketball players before Twitter: Lew Alcindor, UCLA

If you’re in the percentage of readers out there that won’t know who this is off the top of your head — don’t feel bad. It’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar now and has been for some time.

After winning 71 consecutive basketball games on his high school team in Manhattan, Alcindor left the East to make the big jump to UCLA, where he went on to play for one of the greatest of all time in Coach John Wooden. The duo would lead UCLA to three consecutive national championship teams, with Alcindor claiming a record three National Tournament MVP awards.

Alcindor is without a doubt one of the greatest collegiate players of all time, and may even be the best basketball player of all-time, but we won’t get into that discussion here. Before he took the legendary title of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Alcindor made national headlines as Lew Alcindor, tearing up every level of competition on his way to history.

His dominant play literally changed the rules of the collegiate game—with such a historic breakthrough in the game, imagine if he had done it in an era where social media had been around? The reaction, likely, would’ve been priceless.

In an era where Alcindor could dunk on anyone, forcing the NCAA to outlaw the shot until 1976, imagine how much of an angry reaction that would’ve caused on, say, Twitter?

Arguably the greatest college basketball player of all time, and a revolutionary of the game, Alcindor may also have had the biggest Twitter impact, had the two time periods lined up. Learning more about his play during the creation of this article, it isn’t hard to imagine him breaking Twitter.