The center position is starting to rebound (no pun intended) in the modern NBA. After years of point guard domination, we’re starting to see impactful bigs make a strong return. They score big, they’re hard to handle, and they create nightmares for opposing defenses.

Dealing with those big-impact centers is the subject of today’s Blazer’s Edge Mailbag.

I have a summer mailbag question for you.

We have these mobile, playmaking bigs in the modern NBA, like Jokic, Wembanyama, Anthony Davis and Embiid, and maybe Yang Hansen is a mini-Jokic in the making too. I watch them dribble in the high post and drive with the ball, and their dribble is high and awkward, and I always wonder — why aren’t we seeing guards constantly zip under them and steal the ball with impunity? Do you have an explanation of that?

I like questions like this because they highlight the changing face of the NBA.

Before we start, though, I should point out that the centers you cited play in different ways and different positions on the floor. Victor Wembanyama spends a lot of time at the three-point arc on the wings. Anthony Davis is closer to the top of the arc and ranges down to the block. Joel Embiid likes to play at the elbow a lot. Nikola Jokic does all of the above and is just as dangerous off the ball as on. There’s not a one-size-fits-all description for them.

This also helps explain why we don’t see unusual defenses on the regular. Teams do scheme for opposing superstars. The players you mentioned all qualify. But during the regular season, there’s only so much you can do. Get these same players in a seven-game playoffs series and you’re going to see stunts and adjustments aplenty against them. On normal nights, opponents don’t send special defenses against opposing centers. Those stars play a lot of normal-night games during an 82-game season.

There’s also a bigger issue you’re missing, the heart of the matter, really. Most teams surround star centers with good shooters. When they don’t, well…see Denver’s decline after their championship or Philadelphia’s struggle to succeed even with Embiid scoring 30. Because of that emphasis on shooting, sending a guard to bother the center is a bad percentage move.

Even if the defense sends an extra defender, they’re not going to force many actual steals. The Oklahoma City Thunder led the league last season with 10.4 steals per game. That’s getting a steal on roughly 9% of their defensive possessions, an amazing rate.

What happens on the other 91% of defensive possessions? You’ve pulled a guard to stop the center. That guard has to cover space from the edge of the floor, probably the sideline itself, to the middle. Once he’s there, the seven-footer has an easy pass to the guard’s former man for an open three.

Let’s say the double-team defense went maximum-efficiency and got the full 9% steal rate. That’s 10.4 extra possessions. Just to be kind, we’ll presume many of them are fast breaks going the other way. We’ll give the aggressive defense a chance to convert 80% of them into successful layups. That’s about 16.6 extra potential points per game. Impressive.

On the 91% that didn’t result in steals, we’ll give the center the option to toss to an open perimeter shooter. We’ll be ultra-conservative and give that shooter a 33.3% success rate on the open threes. That way-too-low shooting percentage still results in 104.4 extra potential points per game for the offense.

Put another way, if the offense shot just 33.3% from distance on those kick-outs, the center would need to connect with the shooter just 1 play in 6 in order to exceed the total combined points generated by all those steals at an 80% run-back-layup conversion rate.

Back in the day when possessions were slower, three-point shots were rarer, and offense was concentrated in the middle of the floor, your countermeasure against high dribbles made a ton of sense. Nowadays Nikola Jokic could dribble the ball at nose-level and still not be worth double-teaming from the sideline under those circumstances, at least on average. It’s just too easy for the center to read and too far for the guard to recover. Teams will run at him every once in a while—it makes sense if you surprise him with a changed-up coverage—but not on a steady diet.

Once modern offenses get the defense moving, they feel like they have an edge. They’re not trying to heavyweight punch a superstar through double teams anymore. They want to jab you repeatedly through openings in your guard from distance. Sound defense nowadays starts with everybody being glued to a man for as much of the possession as possible, leaving a bad shooter open on the perimeter when practical or necessary, but otherwise being ready to arrive in the offensive player’s grill the same time the ball does. Teams that do this–including the Thunder–tend to succeed. Teams that fail to close out usually get burned. That’s going to be true whether the ball starts in a center’s hands, a guard’s, or anywhere in between.

Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as possible!

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