WHEN CONSIDERING the Washington Bullets' 7-foot-7, 303-pound center Gheorghe Muresan, it is hard to formulate a description. "Big" doesn't exactly say it. The man is as big as Rhode Island. "Huge" and "gigantic" aren't quite enough, either. It's like saying "Citizen Kane" was a pretty good film or Churchill a decent leader. Superlatives fail.

"Enormous" may come closest to putting a label on the Muresan, the largest player ever to play in a very large league.Muresan isn't your garden variety giant. That's reserved for the dozens of 6-11, 260 pound "big men" roaming around the league. Compared to them, Muresan is, well, enormous.

It isn't like the NBA has never seen big people before. Manute Bol, at 7-6, spent several seasons in the league intimidating shooters, but he was as slender as a swizzle stick. Stronger players would back him underneath the basket and shoot layups. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was 7-2, 267; Shaquille O'Neal is 7-1, 301 - big men any way you look at it. But not compared to Muresan.

Basketball fans in Utah are no neophytes when it comes to evaluating largeness. Mark Eaton, at 7-4, 290, spent 12 years with the Jazz, scaring people out of the lane. He changed the meaning of the term "patrolling the paint." He didn't patrol it, he enveloped it. As coaches like to say, you can't teach height, and Eaton was a natural at height. He ended up the greatest shot-blocker in history.

The Jazz even have their own giant this year in 7-2, 280-pound Greg Ostertag - a man big enough to make people stare. But even Ostertag looks up to Muresan.

Picked in the second round of the 1993 NBA Draft, Muresan was the kind of intimidating force the Bullets wanted in the middle. They had seen Bol, who played for them for just over three seasons, but tired of his silly 3-point attempts and inability to gain weight. They wanted a force inside. They found the answer in Muresan. Big they wanted and big they got. He wore a size 20 shoe and had a 7-foot-101/2-inch armspan. He could grab the rim without leaving his feet. He was an inch taller than Bol, previously the biggest player ever to wear an NBA uniform, and 78 pounds heavier. He could hide Bol in his shirtsleeve.

True to form, despite the array of well-known players on the Bullets - Chris Webber, Juwan Howard, Rod Strickland, Calbert Cheaney - it was Muresan who drew the most attention, Monday night at the Delta Center. He was as big as a house and twice as immoble. Whenever he did move, it looked like a support beam was collapsing. He scored a team-high 18 points, took in a team-high nine rebounds, blocked two shots and altered several others. All in all the kind of night the Bullets had in mind when they drafted him.

Even though they won easily, 111-89, the Jazz had to do some adjusting to account for Muresan. From the start, they knew it wouldn't be a normal night - unless you consider shooting over a goal post normal. Karl Malone reversed under the basket and put up a wild left-handed shot, just to get it past Muresan's outstretched arms. Greg Foster tried to block Muresan on a shot but was whacked hard across the nose for his trouble. Bryon Russell and Shandon Anderson had to turn routine layups into twisting, double-clutching prayers. Foster and Ostertag tried hard not to shout "Avalanche!" every time Muresan went up for a jump-hook.

"He holds the ball up there and you feel like a little kid playing keep-away," said Foster.

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Late in the game, Muresan batted a Jazz pass into the air and went against Ostertag for the ball. Ostertag jumped but Muresan didn't. He just grabbed the ball like he was unscrewing a light bulb.

"He is," said Karl Malone, "the biggest guy I've ever seen."

In his fourth season in the NBA, Muresan has become a serviceable player. While many expected him to end up a sideshow, he is leading the Bullets in field goal percentage (.573) and is second in blocked shots. He averages 9.6 points a game. While not nearly the shot-blocker Eaton was, he alters the game nonetheless, standing in the middle on both ends of the court, taking up space. Teams are forced to set up their offenses farther out; defenses worry about denying the entry pass into the middle. Once he gets the ball down low, it's like dropping an apple into a shopping cart.

Muresan notwithstanding, the Jazz came away with an easy win and left feeling young - which was fitting indeed. Because no matter how big you are, playing against Muresan is bound to make you remember what it was like to be a kid.

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