Zach Edey, Donovan Clingan beg question: Does NBA have room for behemoth

Follow live coverage of Connecticut-Purdue men’s national title game

As I was talking to former Memphis Grizzlies players at Marc Gasol’s jersey retirement this weekend, the topic that inevitably came up was just how much the NBA had changed in a dozen years or so. The plodding, post-heavy “Grit N Grind” style of those Memphis teams is scarcely even an option in today’s league … not just because of the 3-point eruption, but because of the demands that revolution has made on the league’s biggest players on the defensive end.

While the object of the game remains the same and the rules have changed less than you think, the tactics and strategy of how to get there have undergone a pretty violent shift. Call it pace-and-space or seven seconds or less or whatever; spreading the floor and shooting 3s has changed the way teams approach the game.

In particular, it has fundamentally changed the center position. For instance, consider the 2006-07 season. Then, a 7-foot-6 Yao Ming averaged 25 points a game and made Second Team All-NBA, with his Houston Rockets ranking sixth in defensive efficiency. The tactical hack to beat him in the playoffs that year was to make him defend free-throw line jumpers by Carlos Boozer.

Yao wasn’t alone; a lot of slow, plodding giants roamed the NBA landscape then, from Cleveland’s 7-3 Zydrunas Ilgauskas to Boston’s 280-pound one-hand shot-faking Al Jefferson to New York’s massive Eddy Curry (who played 2,849 minutes that year!) to the Los Angeles Lakers’ 7-foot, 270-pound teenage sensation Andrew Bynum.

The Pulse Newsletter

Free, daily sports updates direct to your inbox. Sign up

Free, daily sports updates direct to your inbox. Sign up

Buy

Since then, the league’s persistent creep to the perimeter, and the resultant requirement that all five players be able to guard the perimeter, has steadily eroded the ranks of the behemoth centers. Yes, we still have a lot of tall players, like 7-4 Victor Wembanyama and 7-3 Kristaps Porziņģis, but these guys play more like supersized guards than the human-blocking sleds of yore.

To the extent heavyweights remain, they’ve had to change to stay ahead of the curve. Today, it’s a tiny group that mostly includes elite skill guys. There’s a center who plays more like a point guard (or a warlock) in Nikola Jokić, a jump-shooting, foul-drawing scoring machine in Joel Embiid, and a 3-point-shooting, drop-coverage savant in Brook Lopez … and almost nobody else. Jusuf Nurkić, Boban Marjanović, Andre Drummond and (depending on the day) Zion Williamson are the only other players still in the league whose bodies look like they belong in a 2007 game.

In their stead have been a stream of skinny, tall centers like Wemby, the Zinger and Chet Holmgren; smaller, fast-and-bouncy centers like 6-9 Bam Adebayo and Atlanta’s 6-10 Clint Capela and 6-8 Onyeka Okongwu; and up-gauged former power forwards like Al Horford. Even the traditional 7-footers — your Deandre…