One of the more interesting aspects of the NBA Draft is how it often reflects broader trends in the NBA.
Heading into this year’s draft, the small-ball revolution is nearly complete. The league has transformed over the last eight years into a three-point firing beast, with nearly every team in the league, even the bad ones, shooting a lot of threes and rarely playing two bigs simultaneously. As a consequence, the traditional center, the kind we remember as recently as the mid-2000s, is basically extinct.
Back-to-the-basket bigs basically don’t exist anymore and if they do, they’re either on bad teams or backups for better ones.