Khalid El-Amin, a former UConn Huskies men's basketball star, was ranked No. 22 in Chuck Klosterman's list of the 50 Greatest College Basketball Players of all-time. Klosterman's rankings took into fact the following factors: talent, the player's college career had to be more memorable than their pro one, the player possesses an unorthodox game (ideally), having a collegiate persona, the dead are more valued than the living and Klosterman's age bias (he's 39).
El-Amin, who played at UConn from 1997 through 2000, was named the Big East Rookie Of The Year after setting the Huskies' single-season scoring record for a rookie, averaging 16 points. As a sophomore, he wa the starting point guard on the Huskies' team that beat Duke in dramatic fashion to win the NCAA Championship in 1999. In 2000, El-Amin averaged 16 points per game, 4.4 assists and 1.7 steals and was named the the All-Big East first team.
Klosterman writes that El-Amin, who never went on to do anything notable in the NBA, reminds him of that fat kid you play in intramurals that just keeps beating everybody.
22. Khalid El-Amin (UConn, 1997-2000): Did you ever play intramural basketball against a short, fat, confident kid who kept driving the paint and effortlessly scoring over every clown who tried to stop him? And no matter how hard you played him, he never seemed excited or intimidated or even particularly interested? And then - when the game was finished, and everyone else was exhausted - he casually decided to jump into some other random intramural game and scored another 28 points in the exact same way? El-Amin was the NCAA version of that unstoppable fat kid. (via Grantland.com)
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