The NBA’s center position has an uncertain but promising future

Every few years, the center position is declared dead. Of course, every few years, the center position is also declared resurrected. The league itself can’t even seem to decide whether or not center is actually still a position anymore. It’s been a few years since the center slot was eliminated from All-Star voting, yet it remains on All-NBA ballots.

You don’t have to look much farther than the last two years of free agency to see teams are still wrestling with whether or not centers matter, either, or should. In the opening days of 2016 free agency, several teams splurged on expensive centers: the Knicks gave Joakim Noah $72 million over four years; Bismack Biyombo got the same deal from the Magic; the Lakers and Wizards handed Timofey Mozgov and Ian Mahinmi, respectively, $64 million over four years; the Hawks allotted $70.5 million over three years to Dwight Howard; the Bucks ponied up $50 million over four years for Miles Plumlee — the list goes on and on.

A year later, nearly all of those deals look like albatrosses. Noah’s is the worst contract in the league. D’Angelo Russell had to be traded in order to dump Mozgov. The Wizards would love to dump Mahinmi. Howard was dumped for Plumlee (and another contract), who himself was dumped for Spencer Hawes and Roy Hibbert months earlier.

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And really, it’s not just the centers who are anvils on teams’ balance sheets. It’s any big man that can’t play both ends of the floor. Ryan Anderson and Meyers Leonard’s contracts are considered so bad they’ve been holding up a potential Carmelo Anthony trade and the Wizards had to attach a first-round pick to Andrew Nicholson’s four-year deal to get rid of him at last year’s deadline. (They were only successful because the Nets are still playing with Monopoly money.)

This offseason, NBA teams course corrected and the big-man market cooled considerably. Hardly any of these guys got seriously paid. Blake Griffin got his max deal and Paul Millsap came (kind of) close, but Kelly Olynyk and Serge Ibaka are the only other bigs to pull down deals worth double-digit million dollars a year covering more than two seasons.

Everyone else has been fighting for short-term deals and/or scrap-heap dollars. Patrick Patterson only pulled down the taxpayer mid-level exception over three years, a year after his former bench front court-mate Biyombo got an average per-year salary that nearly exceeds the total value of Patterson’s contract. Mike Muscala got only $10 million over two years and Dewayne Dedmon got $14 million for the same length of time. Taj Gibson and Zach Randolph might have gotten Mozgov money a year ago but instead had to settle for two-year, mid-teens million dollar deals. Not only that, but a bunch of guys that would have been raining in cash last year are still on the market. The restricted free agents (Nerlens Noel, JaMychal Green, Mason Plumlee, Alex Len) have barely gotten whiffs.

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It’s interesting to view this wildly erratic big-man market in contrast to the market for wings and point guards, which remained largely friendly — stars like Stephen Curry, Kyle Lowry, Gordon Hayward and Kevin Durant got paid, obviously, but most of the sub-elite players at those positions pulled down significant deals as well. Jeff Teague, Jrue Holiday, Patty Mills, George Hill, Andre Iguodala, Andre Roberson, Dion Waiters, Tony Snell, Danilo Gallinari, Joe Ingles, Otto Porter and James Johnson all got double-digit million dollars per year over three years or more.

Point guard has become the NBA’s most important position and there’s a scarcity issue on the wing, so it makes sense. Meanwhile, the league is one where big men increasingly don’t even play down the stretch of important games unless they’re elite on one side of the floor or the other — and sometimes not even then. We’ve seen Kevin Love and/or Tristan Thompson on the bench at the end of Finals games the last two years, for example, and they’re two of the Cavaliers’ four best players. One-way bigs now routinely get played off the court at important times, which is why it doesn’t make much sense to pay them big money.

Interestingly, this trend of sidelining bigs is cropping up just as the league is suddenly awash in promising young centers that fall somewhere along the spectrum of high-level contributors, (potential) future stars or current stars. Anthony Davis, Rudy Gobert, Karl-Anthony Towns, Joel Embiid, Kristaps Porzingis, Nikola Jokic, Steven Adams, Jusuf Nurkic, Myles Turner, Clint Capela and Thon Maker are all 25 or younger. And those are just the guys who have flashed huge potential. You also have a group that has either been inconsistent or mostly just solid — think your Marquese Chrisses, your Richaun Holmeses and your Willy Hernangomezes. Of these players, only Davis, Gobert and Adams are even onto their first post-rookie scale contracts.

How the league adjusts to those players being foundational parts of their teams will go a long way toward deciding what the NBA looks like on the floor, of course, but their impact could also filter down to the bank accounts of the sub-market big men, too. Right now, it doesn’t seem imperative to have centers. When everyone’s going smaller and smaller, you have to do it too so you can counter. But if skilled and powerful bigs that can play against smalls keep sweeping through the league, opponents are going to have to counter at some point.

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There’s a reason “you can’t teach size” has had staying power as a maxim in the NBA, after all. The center position surely looks different than it did even a few years ago, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still define the league once again if the current crop moving in works out as expected.