Does Warriors Finals Win Mark the End of the NBA Center?
Strategically speaking, this year’s NBA Finals necessitated some truly unique basketball. The numbers LeBron James put up in Finals are obviously completely insane, and it’s hard to overstate how special the type of basketball Steph Curry and the Warriors have played all season. From a league-wide standpoint however, the most important development might have come from Steve Kerr benching Andrew Bogut in Game 4 and beyond. Smart NBA people have asked the question:
Did we just witness the extinction of the NBA Center as we know it?
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It’s easy to come to that conclusion after the success the Warriors had switching out Bogut for a 6′ 7″ Draymond Green at center. The Warriors were able to run and space the floor better for their shooters by replacing Andrew Bogut, who is almost a complete non-factor offensively, for Green. So what now? Are we officially in the era of position-less basketball?
The Warrior’s small-ball lineup made them more effective offensively, but it came with its sacrifices on the defensive end.
Golden State got killed on the boards and turned Timofey Mozgov into a competent/decent/dare I say almost good(?) offensive player. In the end the Warriors always knew they were the more complete team, deciding that the offensive improvement in playing without a center would mitigate the requisite issues defensively.
It’s important to remember that the last two weeks of basketball happened in a vacuum separate from all other consequences. Teams are able to make more drastic game-to-game adjustments in a best of seven series compared to the regular season. What worked for the Warriors against a depleted Cavs roster probably wouldn’t have fared so well against, say, the Clippers. It certainly hasn’t proven to work throughout an 82-game season.
Perhaps went shouldn’t eulogize the modern-day center just yet.
It’s no accident that the Heat have positioned their future around two big men. Miami is paying Chris Bosh $20-plus million per for the next four years and they’ve already earmarked max-deal cap space for Hassan Whiteside, who started this past season in the D-League. There’s still gigantic questions to be answered about Whiteside’s maturity and development, but finding a 7-foot shot blocker who also has offensive skills is the NBA equivalent to striking oil.
So maybe we have confused extinction with evolution. There’s a reason why teams are still desperately drafting 7-footers. In basketball, being taller will always be an advantage. The game is still fairly straightforward; the closer you can get to the rim, the better. Analytics have only confirmed that.Yes, there hasn’t been a dominant post-up big man since Shaq, but does that mean there will never be another one?
Some have used these Finals as a referendum against a guy like Jahlil Okafor, citing the absence of post-up play in the league. But if there’s a lack of post-up play, doesn’t that mean teams are now less accustomed to guarding back-to-the-basket type centers? Okafor could very likely be the kryptonite to a no-center lineup. All it’s going to take is one dominant big man to change our reasoning again.