Actually, a lot of people would claim that height is the most important thing in playing basketball. Average NBA players are 78.9 inches tall. Height is roughly normally distributed, this puts them at about 3 SD above mean height. They surely aren't typically 3 SD above the mean in any trait that doesn't correlate strongly with height, and height is less environmentally influenced (and simply simpler) than the traits it correlates with so its reasonable to assume that it is more causal of other extreme traits than the reverse.