The 2007 NBA draft had one of the deeper pool of talent in recent memory. Greg Oden emerged as the consensus top pick following his impressive stint at Ohio State and was selected first overall by the Portland Trail Blazers. The now-defunct Seattle SuperSonics hit the jackpot when Kevin Durant landed on their laps as he turned out better than advertised.

There are still a lot of players active in the league right now from that class including Marc Gasol, who was not a highly-touted prospect that time and was only selected in the second round with the 48th overall pick.

Many teams passed on him as he was a big center who played in Europe and was considered very raw at that time. Another issue teams saw in him was his weight and lack of athleticism. However, he has become one the best centers in the league today, proving his doubters wrong, including a team that gave him a nickname during the pre-draft process.

Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey recently admitted that his team called Gasol “Man Boobs” and allowed them to ridicule his body and poor conditioning. After seeing him turn out the way he is as a player now, he made a rule for the franchise not to give nicknames to any player in the draft anymore.

“In the 2007 draft there had been a player his model really liked: Marc Gasol. Gasol was twenty-two years old, a seven-foot-one center playing in Europe. The scouts had found a photograph of him shirtless. He was pudgy and baby-faced and had these jiggly pecs. The Rockets staff had given Marc Gasol a nickname: Man Boobs. Man Boobs this and Man Boobs that.

‘That was my first draft in charge and I wasn’t so brave,' said Morey. He allowed the general ridicule of Marc Gasol’s body to drown out his model’s optimism about Gasol’s basketball future, and so instead of arguing with his staff, he watched the Mem­phis Grizzlies take Gasol with the 48th pick of the draft (editor's note: after trade with the Lakers). The odds of getting an All-Star with the 48th pick in the draft were well below one in a hundred. The 48th pick of the draft basically never even yielded a useful NBA bench player, but already Marc Gasol was proving to be a giant exception.

The label they’d stuck on him clearly had affected how they valued him: names mattered. ‘I made a new rule right then. I banned nicknames.'”

Gasol worked on his physical state and shed a lot of weight over the course of his career. He is now considered one of the most-skilled big men in the league and has been named an All-Star twice and won the Defensive Player of the Year award in 2013.

Now that Morey has shared this story, all eyes are now on Marc Gasol's reaction. It may come from an interview, a social media post, or how Gasol plays in Memphis' next game against Houston.