nate33 wrote:At this point, teams only need one legit big man on their roster, just so they can match up with the handful of true centers left in this league. You don't want to be stuck guarding Cousins, Drummond or DeAndre Jordan with Markieff Morris for 36 minutes.
Not necessarily Markieff Morris, because, well... but to be honest, going small isn't really bad idea even against those guys. You want a bit of size, but the reality is that if you can't get a multi-tool C, you're better off without one. The era of the big, unskilled (relative other players in the league) C is over.
Skilled Cs are still going to have a place in the league. They aren't going to be as dominant as they used to be, but they're still going to have a place and be very good. The guys who aren't going to be in the league are bigs who really aren't super committed to the game but are reasonably coordinated and/or athletic and are willing to play anyway because somebody is going to pay them millions to do it.
See, Morris may be a problem for 36 minutes game in and game out, but if you stop throwing big money at guys like Mahinmi, and even Gortat (I love Gortat, but the NBA is starting to pass him by, even though he's still been pretty good this season), you suddenly have a LOT of money available to pay multiple variations of Markieff (hopefully better ones). It's that kind of swiss army knife approach that is simply more effective than having one C on your roster for the odd superstar out there. You're much better off challenging that superstar on both ends of the floor overall, so if you can find a legitimately good C of your own, fine. If you can't, and even if you can, going the path of multiple forwards with varying/overlapping skillsets is incredibly effective. It's no longer good enough just to be big. Being big is now more of a tiebreaker than anything, where if you aren't as good from a skill perspective, teams are going to be able to find some 6'8"-ish player who can do the trick while doing a bunch of other stuff, too.
The other interesting thing about Cs that most fans seem to have not caught on to just yet is that they largely aren't defensive players anymore and haven't been for a few seasons now. Most teams, even with star Cs, cede a worse ortg to their opponents with said C out there than with him on the bench. And teams that often run with multiple bigs tend to be teams that are better offensively than defensively. Look at the Wolves, who are actually pretty awful defensively but very good offensively. Teams like the Warriors, Rockets and Raptors manage to do both, with a variety of diverse forwards and Cs. The Celtics, meanwhile, have Horford as their only big, and he's probably a C at this point, but not really a traditional one the way people often think of them, and they run a bunch of inexperienced forwards and are great defensively but not so hot offensively.
