Milwaukee Bucks: Get to know center Robin Lopez

SACRAMENTO, CA – MARCH 17: (Photo by Rocky Widner/NBAE via Getty Images)

Robin Lopez will suit up alongside his brother for the Milwaukee Bucks next season, but what do you need to know about him and his journey so far?

In the flurry of free agency deals that broke on Sunday night, two in particular stood out as momentous for one of the NBA’s most famous families.

It was widely expected that Brook Lopez would re-sign with the Bucks, and he did just that as he agreed to a four-year, $52 million deal. What wasn’t necessarily anticipated, though, was that his twin brother, Robin Lopez, would be joining him in Milwaukee on a two-year deal at the room exception.

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Outside of two-on-two games in the driveway with their older brothers growing up, the formative years of Robin and Brook’s basketball careers were spent playing on the same teams. Then, they arrived in the NBA, and that all changed.

Both Lopezes have enjoyed tremendously successful NBA careers over the years since, and although they lived in the same city when Brook was on the Nets and Robin was with the Knicks, the Bucks have now given them their first chance to play together as professionals.

At this point, Bucks fans are more than familiar with Brook, but what should they expect from Robin?

Who better to turn to for an answer to that than the twins’ mother, Deborah Ledford? As detailed by K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune in 2017:

"“When especially Robin first started playing basketball, Ledford said he realized everyone most wanted to shoot. ‘He thought, ‘I’ll just do the dirty work and help everybody else,’ Ledford said. ‘He’s still doing the same thing. He’s making his teammates better. Everybody he has played with — Anthony Davis, LaMarcus (Aldridge), Melo (Carmelo Anthony) — loves playing with him.'”"

Ledford raised the twins as a single mother, and undoubtedly shaped their varied interests away from sport. But Ledford, a competitive swimmer who once held Olympic aspirations, and her parents, a basketball player and gymnast, respectively, also played a major role in passing on the physical and athletic gifts that helped Robin and Brook to reach the NBA. (It should also be noted that the twins’ father, Heriberto, was a Cuban baseball player)

With Deborah and Heriberto measuring in at 6’1″ and 6’5″, respectively, Ledford’s brothers all between 6’8″ and 6’11”, and her father being 6’7″ tall, it’s fair to say the twins were born to be exceptionally tall. In fact, the first reference to Robin and Brook in Sports Illustrated arrived in 1990, before they were two-years-old, when a note about their brother Alex’s high school career included a light-hearted tidbit about rumors of a scout being in the maternity ward when the then projected seven-footers were born.

An L.A. Times profile of the twins in their high school days even illustrates just how rare it is to have twins over the height of 7’0″:

"“Experts say the odds of being 7 feet tall in America are incredibly small. ‘If you walked into a pediatrician’s office, they couldn’t tell you what percentile a 7-footer would be in,’ said Richard Steckel, an Ohio State University professor who has studied height. ‘It would be 99.99999. The nines would go on forever. To have twin 7-footers, well, that’s off the charts.'”"

Still, as much as great athletic genes and exceptional size may have given the Lopezes their chance, it’s taken their talent and attitude to carry them to where they are today.

(Side note: Brook and Robin are often referred to as identical twins, but testing proved inconclusive at the time of their birth so it’s unclear whether they’re, in fact, identical or fraternal twins.)

Bucks fans will likely already be familiar with Brook’s journey to Milwaukee, but now let’s take a closer look at how Robin’s NBA career has led him up to this point.