The NBA once favored strong centers. Now? Not so much. But the Philadelphia 76ers are banking on the center role to reemerge
Post-season basketball was once driven by the center position. To play in post-season, you had no choice. You simply had to have one. Do that, and you won. Try to go with average, you lost. Eventually, the NBA changed rules to mitigate the role of center. The Philadelphia 76ers are trying to follow in the footsteps of those legends of the NBA.
You knew them as NBA stars: Shaquille O’Neal, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, Wilt Chamberlain, Moses Malone, Bill Russell, and even Dikembe Mutombo. They were the former power brokers of the NBA. Where they went, rings and trophies soon followed.
Centers role… er rule… er..
The formula for dominating center is simple, and was stated plainly by Abdul-Jabar in an interview with TheAtlantic.com’s Kevin Fixler back in 2012:
"“An effective center should have the ability to deny the opposition any easy points in the paint,” Abdul-Jabbar—a six-time champion and most valuable player, the league’s all-time leading scorer, and arguably the best to ever play the position—said in an email interview. “Offensively a great center will have an arsenal of shots that make him impossible for one man to guard.”"
But those characteristics still appear in the NBA. So it’s not the center position. It was the value of the back-to-the-basket-low-post game that has been the problem for the NBA. The league simply did not want the magic formula to be so automatic through the low post.
So they changed the rules.