Lockdown504090 wrote:Can you think of a game where a team tried to switch a wing or a power forward on embiid? if so who did the best at attempting to guard? The way this guy is dominating, I wonder if he is just going to break modern defenses in the playoffs the way steph broke conventional defenses.
I cannot think of any but addressing your last sentence...the absence of physically dominant bigs in the mid to late 2010s made small ball a natural and effective exploitative strategy adjustment. Just glancing at centers on All-NBA teams from a lot of those years, you're seeing guys like DeAndre Jordan, Marc Gasol, Joakim Noah, Anthony Davis, Gobert...other than Cousins, none of these guys were really going to punish you offensively for lack of size, and Cousins was never in the playoffs.
However now that there are some serious high usage, physically dominant forces (not just Embiid but also Zion and to a lesser extent Jokic) I think we'll see some more prioritization of teams employing bigs with size in the way that they did a decade ago to deal with Dwight and Bynum. Kendrick Perkins basically made a career of it, though I expect that they're going to have to be significantly more skilled to stay alive against more sophisticated modern offenses.
I'd imagine the guys that will suffer the most in value will be the undersized rim running centers like Nerlens, Montrezl Harrell, Jarrett Allen, Clint Capela, etc - guys that neither space the floor offensively and also aren't big enough to body up with Embiid on defense.