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The story
Over on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” board, a thread heated up around the idea that Shintaro Midorima from Kuroko’s Basketball might be the de facto strongest player in the series. Posters split over how to counter his 100%-accuracy shot, and over just how well Ryota Kise’s “Perfect Copy” can actually replicate the threat Midorima poses.
Citing in-story specs like his hang time, height, and weight, some argued he’d be “basically breaking the rules” in real life, and the discussion spiraled into a full ranking debate of the Generation of Miracles.
What people said
but if there were two Midorimas, basketball as a sport would collapse
And that's exactly what makes Kise so dangerous
depending on the situation, he can become a second Aomine or a second Midorima
and if he's copying Midorima, holding off on activating Perfect Copy until right before he catches the pass and shoots saves him a ton of stamina
Just keep feeding Midorima the ball nonstop and he's unbeatable
The farther out the shot, the longer it takes to actually go in
so you just need to outscore him at a faster pace than that
the American team in the last match did exactly that
basically just ignoring Midorima entirely
Kagami stopped him plenty of times though
Aomine's kind of close to that, arguably
Isn't "insane stamina drain" literally the downside?
It's surprisingly good, honestly
Same deal with Prince of Tennis or Reborn — plenty of non-fujoshi readers watched those too, it's Jump after all
Wasn't that school supposed to be a Tokyo-representative regular…
is a school that makes the Inter-High every single year really 'scrub tier'?
good sports manga basically never have villains
Even Slam Dunk had guys who injured opponents on purpose though
we're talking a level where ceiling height, inbound rules, and even the 3-point line would need to change
Lol, people calculated that with a 13-second hang time the ceiling would need to be at least 280 meters
but if Midorima existed, either the rules would have to change or, worst case, he might get 'taken care of'
otherwise basketball as a sport would be finished
Well, 195cm and 79kg is pretty stick-thin, so realistically the 'Midorima hack' would just be injuring him and benching him for a whole season
Even within Kuroko's Basketball, Hanamiya's Kirisaki Daiichi already does exactly that
No, that's exactly the point 51 was making
he seems like the guy who'd mesh best with Kuroko, so it's odd they set them up as a bad match from the start
Kuroko's not exactly the serious type either
dude randomly punches his own teammates out of nowhere
at this point the only fix is bombing the TV stations and canceling Oha Asa (the real morning-show horoscope segment his 'lucky items' parody)
Akashi: 'Can't you just steal the pass? (lol)'
Wouldn't he be unable to get a shot off against Aomine or Murasakibara too, not just Kagami?
Not sure about Murasakibara, but Aomine… I dunno
this guy's 195cm with a massive vertical to begin with, and in the whole series only five guys are even taller than him
Wouldn't it actually help the team if Murasakibara, basically the best defender around, was the one assigned to guard Midorima?
but between two teams built from equally matched players, the team with Midorima on it wins 100% of the time
The only guys who can handle him one-on-one are Miracle-tier
even the Uncrowned Kings can't do anything about him, so despite the positional mismatch it fell to Akashi to guard him — and Akashi doesn't even blame the Uncrowned Kings for losing to Midorima, that's just treated as expected
the only copies that should clearly cost him something are Murasakibara's and reproducing Akashi's eye
Of course he'd get more tired than usual doing movements he doesn't normally do
↑ yeah, that's definitely not it
If you're counting defense too, maybe
Actually, his teammates really do drop back whenever he shoots
plus there's that hang time that ignores the laws of physics
Murasakibara's the most realistic one, honestly
Background and Key Points
Kuroko’s Basketball (Kuroko no Basuke) revolves around the “Generation of Miracles,” five prodigy players who each dominated Teiko Middle School with a different superhuman skill. Midorima Shintaro’s is a three-point shot with a freakishly high arc and effectively 100% accuracy; the thread’s jokes about “hang time” and ceiling height are riffing on the fact that his shot’s arc is drawn so extreme it would need a stadium roof hundreds of meters tall to be physically possible. His other signature trait, obsessively carrying a horoscope-assigned “lucky item,” is a direct parody of Oha Asa, a real long-running morning-TV fortune segment familiar to any Japanese viewer but meaningless without that context. Kise Ryota’s “Perfect Copy” lets him replicate any move he’s seen once, at the cost of physical strain that scales with how far the move is from his natural ability.
The thread wasn’t arguing over whether Midorima is skilled — everyone conceded that — but over whether he’s stoppable in-universe: can a single elite defender (Aomine, Murasakibara, Kagami) shut him down one-on-one, or does beating him require restructuring team strategy (or the rules of basketball itself) around him. A side debate over whether Kise’s copy of Midorima should cost him more stamina than it currently does never resolved either.
What outsiders likely miss is that the “real-life” framing throughout — bombing TV stations to cancel Oha Asa, benching him with an injury — is a genre-standard exaggeration ritual on Japanese boards for overpowered fictional characters, not a serious complaint about the manga’s writing.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Kuroko’s Basketball Fails to Overturn the Midorima-Is-Strongest Theory, Thread Ends.”
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