Being tall isn't a skill. I suspect you could be skillful enough at basketball to overcome the hight disadvantage. However, I think most people who might become that skillful see the high disadvantage (plus the general difficulty of becoming a pro basketball player) and take a different path through life. It's also possible that the amount of time that would be needed to grow your skill past the height disadvantage is too long, so it's not feasible to do it to gain a position in the NBA.
Careful with that "all", even the most highly intelligent humans still have peaks and deficits in different domains.
The interesting finding is that this universal correlation is strong, real, and durable. Of course people in general have cognitive domains where they function better or worse than their g factor indicates, and that's before we get into the fact that intellectual task performance is strongly predicated on knowledge and practice, which is difficult to control for outside of tests designed (successfully, I must add) to do so.
Track and swimming are where innate physical attributes have the most obvious benefits. Michael Phelphs had the perfect body for swimming. There is no amount of trainingg that 99.999% of the population could do to get close to what Usain Bolt ran. Most humans could not train to run under 4 minutes in a mile or under 2:30 in a marathon. They just don't have the right muscular and cardiovascular physiology.
Team sports are of course more complicated as other qualities come into play that aren't as directly physiological.
Of course, but I don't think anyone was seriously suggesting that. The vast majority of humans can become pretty good at swimming though. And that was my interpretation of the original claim about cognitive tasks, mathematics, etc.
https://www.lines.com/guides/average-height-nba-players/1519
A paid promotion of International Median is not Average Association.
The fact that he has a wiki page, and that many folks with born without or who have lost legs (~500,000/year Americans experience limb loss or are born with a limb difference https://amputee-coalition.org/resources/limb-loss-statistics...) do not, suggest that the number of people with < 2 is far greater than the number of people with > 2. So the average is still less than 2.
For better or worse, number of legs (or number of arms) is canonical example people use to demonstrate the statistical principal a significant majority of a population can be above average of some metric.
> Lentini was so respected among his peers that he was often called "The King".
Because it turns out that, in the NBA, height does not correspond with ability! This of course makes sense, because all the players are filtered by being NBA professional basketballers. A shorter player simply has more exceptional ability in another dimension, be that dodging reflex, ability to visualize and then hit a ball trajectory from the three point line, and so on. Conversely, a very tall player is inherently useful for blocking, and doesn't have to be as objectively good at basketball in order to be a valuable teammate.
Despite this lack of correlation, when you look at an NBA team you see a bunch of very tall fellows indeed. Simpson's Paradox.
We see the same thing in intellectual pursuits. "I'm not nearly as smart as the smartest programmer I know, but I get promoted at work so I must be doing something right. Therefore anyone could do this, they just have to work hard like I did". Nope. You've already been selected into "professional programmer", this logic doesn't work.
I respectfully, but strongly, disagree. There's a reason most NBA players are over 2 meters tall, and one does not become taller with time, dedication nor focus.
It might be different for intellectual skills but I am not that sure.
Almost anyone can become decent at almost anything though. Which is good already!