Piece By: Peter Jurich
I always assumed growing up that a team had to be big to win in the NBA. It’s not all about height - shooting helps and you always need great guard play to move the ball around the court - but in a game where size dominates, I always thought a championship-caliber team would have an elite center. As a young Bulls fan in the 2010s, I grew up admiring Derrick Rose, but I always made sure to keep an eye on Joakim Noah during the game. Despite having potentially the worst shooting form I have ever seen, I loved to watch Joakim dominate on defense in the paint. I always respected the centers, both past and present, who were truly dominant down low for their teams. After watching a lot of YouTube highlights, I wish that I was alive to see Ewing in the Garden, or see Shaq break a backboard, or see the Dikembe finger wag. Granted I was able to watch Boogie 40-20s, Deandre Jordan catch lobs on the Clippers, and Dwight Howard’s crazy dunks, but I always felt that centers, for whatever reason, were past their prime in the NBA.
Fast forward a couple years and suddenly, it looked like centers were almost nonexistent in the NBA. The Golden State Warriors revolutionized basketball by emphasizing analytics and the value of the three-point shot and used their new philosophy to win three championships in four years. For the majority of this time, especially during the playoffs, it was rare to see a center on the court for Golden State, as they’d often put (undersized) power forward Draymond Green at the 5 in order to run a true small-ball lineup. This allowed the Warriors to put Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant, and Andre Iguodala all on the court at one time, which resulted in a lot of attempted, and made, three pointers.
As the NBA tried to catch up with the Warriors’ dynasty, it became apparent that a championship team would need at least 2-3 consistently great shooters. Oftentimes, coaches would substitute big men and put in smaller players in order to get enough quality shots, while forfeiting size for rebounding, defense, and second chance points. As more and more teams opted to roll out small-ball lineups, fewer and fewer centers were getting quality playing time, and it appeared as if the position’s value was at an all-time low across the league.
However, this past season has been a great assurance that the future of the NBA is still in the hands of big men. Tuesday night, just before the Denver Nuggets’ first game against the Phoenix Suns in the Western Conference Semifinals, the NBA announced that center Nikola Jokić won the MVP award for the 2020-21 NBA season. In the process of winning his first MVP, Jokić became the first Nuggets player, the first non-lottery pick, and only the 6th international player to win the award. In my opinion, more important than all of these distinctions, Jokić became the first center to win MVP since Shaq in 2000. It is hard to believe that in a sport where height should dominate, the biggest man on the court hadn’t won the MVP in 20 years.
The cherry on top of Jokić’s MVP is that the second-place finisher was fellow center Joel Embiid. Embiid posted a very respectable campaign, and potentially would have won the award if he had avoided a knee injury in the middle of the season, but the fact that both of the top two MVP candidates were centers is a significant shift from what we have seen in recent years.
While Jokić and Embiid are held in a different tier of not only centers but NBA players in general, there are still many other centers who are helping to lead the resurgence. Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert has won Defensive Player of the Year three times recently, including this year. My Bulls just traded for Nikola Vucevic to (hopefully) form a formidable scoring duo with Zach Lavine. Karl Anthony-Towns has been the center of the Timberwolves’s rebuild for a couple of years now, and hopefully will click with Anthony Edwards. The future of centers even looks great, with younger guys like Bam Adebayo, Deandre Ayton, and Jarrett Allen ascending in front of our eyes.
So, while Tuesday night was all about Nikola Jokić, as it should be, it’s important to take a second in the middle of the playoffs and appreciate that centers are officially back in the NBA.