You Can’t Stop NBA Offenses—and Now, You Can’t Even Hope to Contain Them
The league is entering the third wave of an offensive revolution that began nearly a decade and a half ago. And just like then, rule changes have made playing defense an untenable situation. Can teams adapt now like they did then?You Can’t Stop NBA Offenses—and Now, You Can’t Even Hope to Contain Them
The league is entering the third wave of an offensive revolution that began nearly a decade and a half ago. And just like then, rule changes have made playing defense an untenable situation. Can teams adapt now like they did then?
Imagine that you’re a defender in today’s NBA. Let’s say you’re P.J. Tucker, the Houston Rockets’ little big man. It took you five years overseas at the beginning of your professional career to solidify a role in the league, and a full decade to earn a reputation as one of the most reliable, versatile defenders in the game. You’re hardly Hakeem at the rim, but you can swing your cannonball frame around to stick with just about every offensive player that comes your way.
Now imagine that one of your covers for the evening is Anthony Davis, a center as big as Tim Duncan with the skill of Isiah Thomas and the fluidity of Grant Hill. Tucker has had some success guarding Davis in the past, utilizing his low center of gravity and quick feet to crowd the five-time All-Star (or as much as a generously-listed 6-foot-6 forward can). But guarding even a standard pick-and-roll can suddenly turn into long division when the player setting the screen can hit a 3-pointer at the same rate as the ball handler.
Hubie Brown used to say that you set screens for one reason: to make defenders think. When someone like Davis rumbles down the court and positions himself for a pick, all at high speed, you’re running a full diagnostic test on the fly: “Can the guard get through [the screen]? I don’t want Chris [Paul] on Anthony Davis if I don’t have to. What can we do to not switch Chris on Anthony Davis?” Tucker said. “Can we be physical enough to get through and not make the switch happen? Can we switch and then send a double-team from the baseline? [Defenses have to account for] different things when you look at a team’s sets and who they have on the floor. Do they have shooters out there right now? Do they not?”
Then there’s the tendencies of the specific players involved. You want to push players away from their preferred spots. (Davis, for instance, shot nearly three times as often from the left block as he did the right block last season.) And when possible, you want to force the ball to an opponent’s weak link and dare him to beat you.
“There are so many different pieces that go into a bigger puzzle,” Tucker said. “It’s hard to even talk about because there’s so much.”
Tucker held his own against Davis in the Rockets’ season opener against the New Orleans Pelicans, drawing an offensive foul and limiting him to four shot attempts in the 23 possessions he logged as Davis’s primary defender. But by the end of the night, Davis had accrued 32 points (on 62 percent shooting), 16 rebounds, eight assists, and three blocks in 39 minutes of a 131–112 shellacking of their hosts at the Toyota Center. The Rockets were the best team in the Western Conference last regular season, reaching new levels of efficiency by pairing their league-leading offense with a surprising, top-seven defense that allowed 105.6 points per 100 possessions. This season has been different. Way different. Tucker and the Rockets hit an even lower low nine days later, allowing 133 points to the L.A. Clippers (again at home). Somehow, none of the early onslaughts suffered rank among the top five in points allowed in a single game through two weeks of the 2018–19 season.
No fan will complain about more scoring, even though the final numbers are looking more like cricket totals lately. But view the NBA’s offensive boom from the other side of the ball and you’ll see an impossible task. The proliferation of 3-point shooting and the extra space it opens up means more options to account for and more ground to cover. Add in the advancements in player development, the rise of analytics, and the league office’s longstanding quest to legislate out excessive physical play, and virtually everyone in the NBA agrees that defense is harder to play than ever before.
“It’s challenging, that’s for sure,” LeBron James said. “You’ve got so many powerful offensive teams that you’re not going to have many possessions that you can be behind because most teams in our league are going to make you pay.”
Welcome to being an NBA defender, where the work sucks and, if you believe Jabari Parker, so does the pay.
The “Seven Seconds or Less” Phoenix Suns are widely credited as the spark of the revolution, but the NBA’s pivot toward a beautiful game was technically birthed by a couple of lines on a brief. Scoring had cratered around the turn of the century, and success was increasingly being dictated by how many bludgeoning 7-foot-1, 325-pound mastodons you had on your team. Ahead of the 2001–02 season, the league pushed back by instituting new rules to open up the floor and promote skill over strength: illegal defense was eliminated, and defensive three seconds was introduced; the time allotted to advance the ball past midcourt was also decreased, from 10 seconds to eight. Three years later, hand-checking and body-checking calls were re-emphasized to further promote freedom of movement.
“The special committee on the rules anticipated when we implemented the package back in 2001 that, fundamentally, it would change the game,” said Stu Jackson, the former NBA executive vice president of basketball operations. “Collectively, all three of those [rules] allowed the game to breathe.”
Not everyone was as hopeful; Pat Riley said at the time that he thought the rule changes would be the death of the game. But the Suns saw an opportunity. In the summer of 2004, ahead of the first season post-hand-checking, Phoenix signed Steve Nash in free agency. Then–Suns owner Jerry Colangelo had led the special committee behind the rule changes, and now his team had the perfect sports bike to weave through the big rigs that were being forced out of the lane.
The thought of preparing for the Suns was somewhat unnerving simply from the standpoint that you didn’t really know what to expect, and you knew it would be a clash of two totally different playing styles.Miami heat coach Erik Spoelstra
“We had a built-in advantage because Jerry Colangelo was the chairman of that board. We knew from the very beginning what was likely to come about. So we were able to plan for longer than everybody else,” said David Griffin, the Suns’ former VP of basketball ops and staffer for nearly two decades. “If you told Daryl Morey right now that three years from now the cap is going to be a number that only he knows, Houston’s going to have a pretty big advantage. We were able to build a team that’s pretty ahead of the curve.”
Soon came the 3-pointers, the ball movement, and the faster pace of play. Griffin said the Suns also placed a heavy priority on steals and blocks in order to generate more transition opportunities. The creative problem-solving wasn’t unique to the offensive end, either. Switching — i.e., teammates swapping individual assignments on screens — was hardly a new concept by the early aughts, but it also wasn’t all that prevalent. Before the defensive three seconds rule, a massive shot-blocker like Alonzo Mourning could set up camp in the paint and flick players like Nash away. But then–Suns head coach Mike D’Antoni says he began seeing more defenses switch against them, across multiple positions, as his offense ripped through the league.
The Suns did it too. Erik Spoelstra, then a Miami Heat assistant coach, remembers being struck by Phoenix’s and San Antonio’s switching in the 2006 playoffs; the Spurs would go as far as putting Tony Parker (6-foot-2) onto Dirk Nowitzki (7 feet). The Heat staff anticipated both teams would switch positions 1 through 4 when they met in that year’s Finals. D’Antoni, however, was the only one that they feared would go as far as switching a non-center onto Miami’s goliaths, Shaquille O’Neal and Mourning.
“You had to be ready for anything and everything with the Suns,” Spoelstra, the Heat’s head coach for the past 10 years, said in an email. “The thought of preparing for the Suns was somewhat unnerving simply from the standpoint that you didn’t really know what to expect, and you knew it would be a clash of two totally different playing styles.”
More schemes and techniques evolved from there. The past 10 years of modern NBA defense can be seen in micro eras. Tom Thibodeau’s approach of flooding the strong side — in other words, walling off the paint and directing the bulk of a team’s defensive pressure to whichever side of the court the ball handler is present on — ushered in a wave of covering areas rather than individual players (and bellows of “ICE!” ringing out in every arena). Roy Hibbert nearly snuffed out the Big Three–era Heat with verticality. But the Warriors brought switching back into vogue when Steve Kerr arrived in 2014 and catapulted the franchise into the stratosphere.
Offense is more dynamic these days, but Golden State defensive guru Ron Adams argues that it’s also less complex. In years past, when teams could play through the post, “your offensive menu was quite vast,” he said. “Coaches required players to learn a lot of plays.” Modern athletes have transitioned the game more into the open court, and with that comes an emphasis on pace, the word that has come to define this current leg of an ongoing revolution.
Pace is defined as the number of possessions a game contains per 48 minutes (or a full regulation game’s worth) of play. The average NBA team has nearly 13 more possessions per 48 minutes than it did two decades ago. As a result, most possessions turn into fire drills for the defense. “There’s not a set script for it,” Adams said. “The court is really spaced. People are scrambling to initially slow down the ball and then go back to your assignment once things are safe. You’ve got quick-shooting teams, you’ve got guys who can really drive to the basket in transition. A lot of things are happening there.”
Everybody starts switching and now they make a rule that there’s no touching, no grabbing—stuff that usually always happens. It’s one of those things where they make rules and you’ve got to work around them.Rockets forward P.J. Tucker
Adams said that switching, and uniform length across multiple positions, had been his preferred approach to countering offenses throughout his nearly five decades in coaching. Switching is Occam’s razor for defenses; it is simply trading assignments with a fellow defender. That is also why it seems so particularly suited for the present: streamlined offenses necessitate equally streamlined defenses. Having the ability to read and react, and even freestyle, is now paramount. That’s what makes the players who can switch onto everyone on the court so valuable. The Warriors may not have a magic eraser patrolling the back line like Rudy Gobert, or even Andrew Bogut anymore, but they do have Draymond Green. And when he isn’t yelling mean things at opponents, he is able to process actions in real time at genius levels. That, plus the 6-foot-7 foward’s ability to deter shots at the rim like a player twice his size, has allowed the Warriors to take the switch a step forward by switching all five positions.
Gobert and Green are two of the best defensive players in the league, but exist on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how they go about their craft. Think of Gobert as a hammer: a tool that derives its efficiency from blunt force. Green, then, would be more like a screwdriver: a tool that affixes and dismantles as part of a larger system of tasks.
“Utah doesn’t want to switch everything because they have a hammer. You don’t want to use a hammer as a screwdriver. And Gobert’s the biggest hammer of all,” said David Thorpe, the executive director of the Pro Training Center and a former ESPN analyst. “Draymond Green is a Hall of Fame player, because when he’s playing he is the most elite screwdriver in the tool box, at a time where screwdrivers are incredibly valuable. That wasn’t always the case. There wasn’t always a period of time when teams would’ve valued his particular tool.”
Green and the Warriors broke through in 2014–15 and rose to the top of the defensive rankings by switching, and in subsequent seasons, most of the league has followed suit. Once again, a D’Antoni team was the one to push it to its extreme. The Houston Rockets switched everything; they switched last regular season, they switched last postseason, and they’ve switched this season. According to data compiled by FiveThirtyEight, the Rockets switched 1,406 times last season — 331 more than the Warriors. With experienced, versatile defenders like Tucker, Chris Paul, and Luc Mbah a Moute added to execute the approach, Houston jumped from 18th on defense in 2016–17 to seventh in 2017–18.
But two weeks into this season, the defense that helped Houston become the foil to one of the greatest teams in history is in crisis. After Friday’s loss to the Clippers, the Rockets are 1–4, 27th in defense following the retirement of last season’s defensive mastermind, Jeff Bzdelik, and talking about junking their scheme altogether. Maybe the retreads and emergency young players being asked to patch up the holes left by the departures of Mbah a Moute and Trevor Ariza can’t keep up. Or maybe the physicality their fleet of midsize-sedan players needed to stand up bigs in the post and scrap through screen after screen has been filtered out through officiating. D’Antoni said last week that more scoring makes the game more fun, but he also admitted that the league’s recent re-emphasis on allowing freedom of movement by keeping a close eye on off-ball holds and grabbing in the post “kind’ve takes our edge away that we’ve had for years.” The Rockets are currently being whistled for nearly four more fouls per game than last season and two more than they were at this point last season. D’Antoni’s team, once the beneficiary of the NBA’s strident rule changes, has now become a victim.
“They keep changing, so you’ve got to keep changing — evolving your defensive game, your schemes and things you want to do,” Tucker said a week before Houston’s come-to-Jesus moment. “Everybody starts switching and now they make a rule that there’s no touching, no grabbing — stuff that usually always happens. It’s one of those things where they make rules and you’ve got to work around them.”
Think about the best defenses in recent memory and you’re bound to list some of the biggest bruisers of their era. The 2007–08 Big Three Celtics. The superstar-less Pistons who won the 2004 title. Any team Pat Riley coached in the ’90s. The 2003–04 Spurs don’t become the best defensive team since the ABA merger without Bruce Bowen’s, um, questionable tactics. Even Draymond, for all of his brilliance, is known to kick an opponent in the gonads every now and then.
Defense and physicality are inextricable. You don’t make a dogged pass or shoot a hard-nosed jump shot; Steph Curry is shimmying, not gritting or grinding. It’s a matter of semantics. The difference between offense and defense is the difference between joy and struggle, and that rift has never been clearer than it is now. No one denies that the rule changes have produced a more aesthetically pleasing brand of basketball. (And with the NBA’s viewership up — and the more-violent NFL’s viewership down — perhaps that’s all that matters.) But there’s still a simmering lament that today’s game is losing a core element.
“I don’t know if the goal is to have 211–185 scores, but we’ve really legislated a lot of the competitiveness out of the game,” Griffin said. “Grit and toughness have much less place in the game now than they ever have.”
Some players may no longer have a place, either. “It’s definitely gonna eliminate a lot of defenders who get physical,” Spurs forward Dante Cunningham told The Ringer after a recent win over the Lakers in Los Angeles. “I’m thinking of one in particular: Tony Allen. Back in the day, he was just a physical presence at all times. He wanted to put his hands on you at every moment. If you moved, he moved with you and grabbed you just to let you know he’s there. I’ve learned a lot from playing with him, playing against him, and just watching him defensively. But you have to adapt now. If they run through the lane, you can’t even touch them. You have to show your hands and keep it moving.”
Cunningham was then asked how he’s adapting to the new rules. “I’m obviously not adapting,” he said. “I just fouled out.”
Defense always has been about making the most out of a bad situation; the best you can hope for on the vast majority of possessions is to limit mistakes and force a team into a bad shot. But dictating a game with defense has become near-impossible. There’s too much space to cover, too many good offensive players on the court at once, and so choosing to deny any one area or player only exposes your defense to a quality shot or a counter. You used to be able to attack an elite offensive player like James Harden on the other end in isolation and try to force them to the bench in foul trouble. (Griffin, the former Cavaliers general manager, said Cleveland always tried to put fouls on Klay Thompson, Golden State’s best wing defender and a dead-eye shooter.) But now opponents can simply switch their top option out of danger. At the beginning of last season’s Eastern Conference finals, the Celtics used switching to bail out 6-foot-2 Terry Rozier from being pummeled by a big man on several occasions; as the Cavs entered the ball into the post to take advantage of the mismatch, a Celtics player more suitable for the task would quickly trade places with Rozier before the ball reached its destination.
I don’t know if the goal is to have 211-185 scores, but we’ve really legislated a lot of the competitiveness out of the game. Grit and toughness have much less place in the game now than they ever have.David Griffin, former Suns VP of basketball ops
Luring a superstar into committing an offensive foul is now a better bet. The problem is that targeting players for fouls goes both ways. And someone like Harden is not only better at drawing them, but also the whistle will almost always favor his side of the contact. So instead of forcing the offensive player off the floor, your top defensive player will be the one absorbing the foul and taking a seat. With players like Harden making trips to the free throw line out of nothing and a rash of shooters manufacturing four-point plays the past two seasons, Griffin, for one, advocated for extreme measures: teaching (technically) illegal actions as technique, whether it’s getting physical on screens or camping out in the post longer than the allotted three seconds.
“I think what’s next is do it all the time and make them call it,” he said. “It’s like on offense: Illegal screens never get called. Ever. So if I’m doing my job as a coach, I’m teaching the illegal screen. I’m showing film of Tim Duncan sticking his ass out and rolling to the rim. I’m showing tape of Draymond Green. And I’m like, ‘Guys, do this right here.’ ‘Well it’s illegal.’ ‘Oh, it is? Have they been called for it in three years?’ If you’re not doing things that are, quote, illegal, to get an advantage, you’re not doing your job. The rules don’t really apply evenly anymore, so you might as well do it until they force you to stop.”
This season, officials have been proactive. The league targeted “impedes, wraps, and contact on screens” before the season and it has resulted in a noticeable uptick in foul calls from last season, with the largest growth seen in non-shooting touch fouls. The league average through two weeks of play is 22.5 personal fouls per game, which is the highest it’s been since 2004–05 and 2005–06, the two seasons directly following the league office’s re-emphasis on hand-checking. Essentially, games are being played with the same amount of stoppages as Michael Jordan’s last season with the Chicago Bulls in 1997–98 — except teams these days play over 11 more possessions per 48 minutes. And while ESPN’s Kevin Pelton recently noted that foul calls go down as the season wears on, an analysis of preseason officiating suggested foul rates are likely to rise regardless. In the meantime, players’ frustration has begun to boil over.
“Defense isn’t really an emphasis anymore in this league,” Green told reporters after Golden State was charged with 29 fouls in a recent loss to Denver. “So I think you’re seeing it all around the league with these high scores. We know what the emphasis is.”
Kiki VanDeWeghe, the NBA’s current executive VP of basketball operations, said that the league doesn’t want to lose a degree of physicality in the game, but it does aspire to create a better balance. “What’s still a work in progress is balancing both defense and offense — making sure that we protect both, and both are allowed to play basketball, and both are entitled to their position,” he said. “When scoring is up, you want to make sure you give defenders a legitimate opportunity, according to the rules, to play defense. We want to make sure our focus is balanced.
“There’s a little calibration that needs to go on from both our teams and our referees, but we’re headed in the right direction. At the end of the day, the initial [plan] was ‘How are we going to capture more of these calls?’ and our data shows that we’re capturing more of those calls.”
Teams and officials will eventually adjust, and tensions will probably cool. But skimming to the top of Green’s ire is the fundamental frustration with defending in the NBA: legislation has a direct effect on the state of play.
“So much of defensive basketball is not just adjusting to the opponent, but adjusting to the officiating and how the game will be called,” Adams said. “We have tried to do that here. You look at the league, you look at how the game is played, you look at which calls are being made, which calls aren’t being made and why, and how can you arrive at a point where you’re not committing these fouls that are important in winning and losing.”
But wait — defenses still win championships, right? Even the cynics of the league’s commitment to weeding out physicality would suggest a correlation between a staunch defense and making the postseason. Indeed, 13 of the top 16 teams in defensive rating earned a playoff berth last season. Only, so did 13 out of the top 16 teams in offensive rating — including a Cavs team that finished 29th overall in defense. An explanation may be as simple as conceding that LeBron James is the ultimate outlier, but the truth may also lie in the growing chasm between game play in the regular season and in the playoffs.
Pace of play and ball movement slow down in the postseason as offenses attempt to wring quality looks out of every possession and defenses deploy more sophisticated game plans developed thanks to the extra prep time. Some teams may even pocket a tactical approach throughout the entire regular season just to spring it on an opponent when the stakes are highest. A team like the Rockets finds a north star in its core principles and sticks to the same scheme throughout; a team the Cavs, however, has nothing to prove in the regular season, and so it sits on a schematic curveball until it needs it most. Griffin, who left Cleveland before last season, said the Cavaliers never guarded the Raptors the same way in the regular season as they did in the postseason.
“The plan was: Look, we’re going to just do what we do, we’re going to outscore people, and then when the playoffs come, we’re going to become really good defensively and we’re going to sweep every Eastern Conference team,” he said. “And that’s kind of what we did. We weren’t trying to show our hand schematically.”
In order to make it there, the Cavs’ regular-season scoring efficiency was just as important as the points themselves. With the league threatening to break the pace barrier, simply setting up your defense is a luxury; it’s why so many teams punt offensive boards in favor of getting back. By scoring, you keep your players out of transition and give your defense a fighting chance. If you can slow the game down even more by making it to the line, even better. (Unsurprisingly, Utah, with its stout defense and measured pace, is leading the league in free throw differential this season by a wide margin.) With scores creeping well past 112 every night, the time needed to inbound the ball may be as effective a deterrent as anything.
In a world where big men shoots 3s and wings cover centers, even the biggest axioms in sports can be inverted: the best offense is a good offense, and the best defense may be a good offense, too.
It may not seem like it now, as the Rockets look up at the likes of Jabari Parker’s Chicago Bulls in the dregs of the defensive rankings, but P.J. Tucker may be as close to an archetype on defense as there is in today’s switch-crazy NBA. The Bucks (and now the Magic) have made a movement out of wingspan, stocking their roster with the longest athletes they can find (and discovering a unicorn in the process). But the prevalence of switching has homogenized the ideal body type at every position. You’re only as useful as the biggest position you can guard as a small, and the smallest position you can guard as a big, which means bigs have to be able to move with the fluidity of a wing and wings need to have the bulk to body up a big man.
Tucker is not the most balletic athlete. Five years ago, he may have been diminished for not looking and scoring like Paul George. But with arms six inches longer than his 6-foot-6 frame, a midsection as thick as a fireplug, good lateral quickness, and the endurance to keep up in a track meet, there are few players in the league that the 33-year-old can’t hold his own against. He may not have the same oversized impact as Draymond Green, but like the Warriors’ one-man security system, his ability to moonlight at center makes him the skeleton key for the team’s entire game plan.
Experience helps too. D’Antoni said it’s easier to switch with veterans, because they’re familiar with the wide scope of positions they’ll face and the various tricks — veer screens, slipouts, etc. — those opponents can employ off a screen. Eric Gordon, for instance, won’t make an all-defense team, but the 29-year-old’s savvy and length-to-strength ratio make him an ideal guard in a switching scheme.
“He’s low enough in his center of gravity to keep bigs from [up]rooting him deep in the paint,” said Griffin, now an analyst for NBA TV and radio. “You don’t repost on Eric Gordon very well. That body type, if you’re going to be his size, is meaningful. You can’t be a skinny 6–4 that gets pushed around. Because if you can switch and I can bury you under the basket, then you don’t have versatility any more. The bigger our wings are, the more interchangeable they are positionally, the better off you are.”
A player with shorter legs and a longer torso is more likely to be good laterally and harder to push around in the post. On the flip side, a player with a higher ratio of height in their legs is often less mechanically sound, because they tend to have tighter hips, which makes it difficult to squat and slide into a defensive position. Magic rookie Mo Bamba may have the length and coordination to one day become a premier defensive player, but stronger players can move him around right now because there’s so much core strength to gain between his midsection and his butt. And if you’re as big as Bamba (7 feet, 225 pounds), you need to be elite on that end. “The defensively-oriented stiff is gone,” Griffin said.
Rim protection is as vital as ever; that’s been made abundantly clear in these first two weeks, as drivers skip to the hoop through the wide lanes created by the growing number of 3-point threats on the floor. It’s just that finding a player who can check off all the requirements of a modern big man — shot-blocking, switchability, and speed without being a complete zero on the offensive end — can feel like running a metal detector over a beach. Everyone on offense needs to create space one way or another, no matter if you’re 6-foot-1 or 7-foot-1. That’s why a rookie like Memphis’s Jaren Jackson Jr. is so tantalizing. Jackson, who just turned 19 years old, has a long way to go, but he has already shown the mobility to guard all five positions, the native feel to identify cutters and know where the block opportunity will come, and the ability to step out on the perimeter on offense and drill a 3-pointer.
There’s still all that high-value space inside, too, just waiting to be prospected. Clint Capela’s ability to switch onto all five positions has helped his rapid rise from a late first-rounder to a franchise cornerstone, but his value is even higher because of the vertical space he can create on lob dunks. Rudy Gobert, the reigning defensive player of the year, can turn the entire painted area into a no-fly zone through his sheer presence, but as much as the 7-foot-1 center hearkens back to the ’90s golden age of centers, the way in which he thrives on offense is more altruistic than individually dominant. He sets some of the best screens in the game, and covers so much ground in the pick-and-roll that something is bound to open up for either his teammates on the perimeter or himself around the rim. Joel Embiid is one of the few Shaq acolytes remaining, a player who actively seeks to dominate opponents down on the blocks. Come to think of it, Orlando-era Shaq, who had the power of a strongman and the mobility of a player like Karl-Anthony Towns, would kill it right now.
“The next MVP center is going to be someone who controls the paint defensively, is able to switch out and guard perimeter players, but also destroys you in the paint offensively,” Thorpe said. “If you want to go small against him and stretch him out, he can guard you on the perimeter and crush you inside on the other end.”
The obvious candidate to end centers’ decade-and-a-half-long drought in the NBA’s highest individual honor is Anthony Davis. As teams around the league contort their lineups to add shooting, the Pelicans have blitzed their way to the league’s best offense by throttling the paint at top speeds. Or maybe it’s Suns rookie Deandre Ayton, who has punished opponents around the basket in preseason and the regular season. Phoenix’s defense has been abysmal through Ayton’s first six official games, providing little reprieve to pre-draft criticisms of the 20-year-old behemoth’s poor recognition skills. But the pairing of Ayton and Devin Booker can easily give the Suns the sort of firepower they need to turn the franchise into a small-batch version of the Seven Seconds era.
Five of the top seven picks in the 2018 draft are big men who have logged minutes at center so far this season. Amid a league trying to reap what the season’s frenetic pace has sowed, it’s clear that teams aren’t willing to give up on size being the ultimate bottom-line advantage, even as recently successful defensive teams like the Rockets grasp at straws in the interim in search of playable personnel. There’s a reason for that. The center is the last line of defense, both literally and symbolically. The position has held that distinction as a stabilizing presence throughout the game’s history. And if there is any hope for defense in these uncertain times, it will likely be found in this next generation of centers, who are being developed without the limitations that were placed on their forebears. How they can be groomed may tell us where defense is headed from here.
This story contains additional reporting from Kevin O’Connor. It was updated after publish to correct the timeline of Kiki VanDeWeghe’s role as the NBA’s executive vice president of basketball operations.
