ORLANDO - If you played basketball growing up and were one of the taller players on the court, you probably had coaches and teammates in your ear giving you the same spiel over and over.
“Post up! Box out! Set a pick!” they would yell your way.
Those were your primary functions as your team’s center, and you accepted it because those were the expectations of the position.
While important stuff, it was quite inflexible. You had specific duties, and rarely did anyone ask you to deviate from the routine.
Boy, have things changed.
Now, the mission for bigs is to be as versatile as possible. “Versatile,” by the way, is quite a contemporary word in basketball lingo. Any of you baby boomers or millennials remember a basketball coach, or a game analyst for that matter, use that word when talking hoops back in the day?
Today, the word is used in pretty much every conversation related to hoops. The more versatile the player is, the more they are featured on the court and the greater the impact they make on a game.
That is certainly true for NBA centers in 2022. It’s glaring when a big man can’t shoot with range, can’t make sharp passes from the perimeter, or can’t handle the ball when facing up a defender.
As far as the shooting element, even Andre Drummond – in no way shape or form someone you’d think of as a shooter – has clearly been working on his outside shot. Now a Chicago Bull, he went 3-for-3 from 3-point distance in a preseason game earlier this week against the Toronto Raptors. He’s made 15 threes in his career and none since the 2019-20 season, just as a sidenote.
One of the game’s bigs that has been doing a little bit of everything the last couple years is the Orlando Magic’s Wendell Carter Jr., now in his fifth NBA season.
Since joining the Magic in March 2021, the 6-foot-10, 265-pounder has added a variety of components to his game. Last year, for instance, he made 70 3-pointers – 43 more than he knocked down in his first three NBA seasons combined.
His playmaking, meanwhile, has become one of his best traits. That was conspicuous during the Magic’s preseason win over the Memphis Grizzlies on Tuesday at Amway Center when he dished out eight assists to go along with scoring 18 points and grabbing seven rebounds.
Maybe most important is that he’s a plus defender. He moves his feet well, is hard to back down, and is willing to sacrifice his body if necessary.
“His versatility is phenomenal,” Magic Head Coach Jamahl Mosley said. “His ability to switch one through five. His ability to playmake, whether the ball is in his hands or whether he’s setting screens. There are just different ways he impacts the game.”
Today’s guards often say they learn some things while watching footage of the all-time greats such as Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Kobe Bryant. For bigs, where there’s of course plenty to learn by watching guys like Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Shaquille O’Neal from their heydays – studying up on their contemporaries is perhaps even more beneficial because of how many different things they can do on the court.
Carter, in fact, says he has learned a lot watching both the MVP and MVP runner-up from the last two seasons.
“Their ability to play the game at a very slow pace, but at the same time, making certain reads and doing certain things on the court – whether it’s passing, rebounding, scoring,” he said about Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid. “Doing everything on the court as what most guards would probably do, or most small forwards would probably do. They are basically doing everything for their team.”
The fact that just a few years ago some were saying centers were a dime a dozen is quite astonishing now. The evolution of the position has not only brought centers back into the spotlight, but one could argue it’s back to being just as important of a role as it was in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s – with aesthetic differences.
Just as a history lesson, all but three of the league MVPs from 1956 – which was the year the award was first distributed – to 1983 were big men. While Larry Bird, Johnson and Jordan temporarily redirected the award’s path, centers recontroled dominance in the 90s and early 2000s when Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson, Karl Malone, O’Neal, and Tim Duncan claimed the honor a combined seven times in a 10-season span from 1994 to 2003.
Stats alone over the last several years tell a very interesting story about how the game is being played, and what bigs are doing to make an impact.
In the 2015-16 season – which was just seven seasons ago – there were 16 players who took a minimum of 200 shots while posting up. In 2021-22, however, just three players – Embiid, Jokic, and Jonas Valanciunas – took 200-plus post-up shots. Carter, in case you are wondering, took 58 shots when posting up.
Something you almost never saw a few years ago, there’s bigs now handling the ball in pick-and-roll situations and getting their own shots out of them. Last season, Jokic took 30 shots in pick-and-roll when he was the ball handler, Embiid took 25 shots, Karl-Anthony Towns took 21 shots, and Bam Adebayo took 18 shots.
Among centers in 2015-16, DeMarcus Cousins led the league in this category with 16 total shots in the pick-and-roll as the ball handler.
For the Magic to make strides this year, their frontline must showcase their versatility on a regular basis. Another key factor will be the team’s chemistry as a whole, which seems to be strengthening by the day.
“I look across the league – I watch other games in the league – and the best teams in the league play unselfish,” Carter said. “They go from good to great (and) great to best. That’s something I want to help install in this team because we got phenomenal players – one through five and our bench is good. We stress it and we do it, but I think we can continue to do it.”