Rumble’s towering roster struggled to a 1-8 SlamBall season

Richard Washington was the recognizable name on Rumble’s towering roster, but the 2023 season turned into a hard lesson in whether size actually produced points. JaeTuan Williams was the only regular listed at 6-foot-2, while Kaylon Tippins-Hill, Tamyrik Fields, Washington, Victorious Dean, Bakari Copeland and Marcus Bradley all stood 6-foot-6 or taller, with Tippins-Hill and Dean both at 6-foot-7.

That edge in length never became a clean scoring engine. Rumble finished 1-8 with 428 points, 61 stops and 62 assists, good for an 11.1% winning percentage and a place near the bottom of the 2023 table. The lone win kept the season from being a total washout, but the numbers showed a team that often had to grind for every possession, then still struggled to turn those chances into enough points.

Washington gave the roster its clearest proven scorer. The former Wake Forest recruit and San Jose State standout averaged 13.4 points and 4.6 rebounds over two seasons with the Spartans, then led the Mountain West in scoring at 19.5 points per game in 2020-21. He also shot 102-for-302 from three-point range in college, a 33.8% mark, and logged three 30-point games in his final season, including a 38-point opener against Fresno Pacific. In SlamBall, Washington finished with 67 points, tied with Williams for the team’s fourth-highest total, behind Tippins-Hill’s 162, Fields’ 71 and just ahead of Dean’s 35.

Tippins-Hill fit the same theme from a different route. The former Cholla High School quarterback threw for 880 yards and five touchdowns and rushed for 347 yards before moving to basketball full time, where he posted 14.0 points and 8.3 rebounds at Tohono O'odham Community College and later 11.9 points and 6.8 rebounds with the Enid Outlaws. That mix of football toughness and frontcourt length was exactly what SlamBall’s 2023 roster build aimed for, with players drawn from basketball, football, track and other backgrounds through a June draft.

The league’s relaunch opened on July 21, 2023 at Cox Pavilion in Las Vegas, backed by an exclusive two-year ESPN and ESPN+ package for the 2023 and 2024 seasons. Rumble was also coached by Ken Carter, who had led the franchise to the championship in SlamBall’s inaugural 2002 season, a reminder of how much history sat behind the jersey. But in a league invented in 1999 by Mason Gordon and first played in Los Angeles, the 2023 Rumble proved that imposing measurements only matter if somebody can finish the possession.