There are more playmaking big men in the NBA than ever before. This begs the question, is basketball becoming a quarterback’s game?
No one envies the quarterback, but everyone loves them.
For every highlight-reel, match-winning touchdown pass, there’s a six-foot-six, 240-pound outside linebacker hunting them with vicious intent.
For every dazzling 20-yard Lamar Jackson run, there’s a snarling, blood thirsty Aaron Donald hunting to halt a QB’s progress with a rib-crushing hit.
Maybe it’s the absence of potentially severe physical consequences, or the increased European influence.
But we’re witnessing the rise of the NBA’s quarterback center.
Whatever it may be, it has seen a higher portion of ball-playing centers enter – and dominate – the NBA than ever before.
An elite modern-day center does everything; score, screen, facilitate, and defend. They’re scoring from everywhere too; in the post, off the dribble, on fast breaks, from beyond the arc.
Now the bigs have always scored at elite rates; ask Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O’Neal, and Wilt Chamberlain, among others. Their physical edge in height and strength gave them paint superiority and easy buckets.
But there’s more to this.
The rise of the NBA ‘quarterback’
Fast-forward to 2023, the center is required to be more than an inside bully.
They’re the NBA’s quarterbacks, as if Jason Williams’ ball-playing and Hakeem Olajuwon’s post game had a 7-foot child.
In the 2014-15 season, Joakim Noah was the NBA’s most creative centre. The former Chicago Bulls man’s assist percentage (the percentage of his teammates field goals assisted while they’re on the floor) was 23%; enough for 41st in the league, while averaging 4.7 assists per game.
Fast forward to the 2023-24 campaign, Nikola Jokic assists nearly half of the Denver Nuggets’ buckets while he’s on the floor. Only Tyrese Haliburton, the point guard inspiring Indiana’s record-breaking offensive figures, lays on more buckets for his teammates than the Serb.
If this was the 2014-15 season, the Joker’s assist percentage would only been bettered by one player in the entire in the NBA: Chris Paul.
To give Joakim Noah credit, Jokic is a dual MVP, a one-time champion, basketballing unicorn with more triple-doubles in his 68 playoff career, and the regular season, than any other NBA centre ever.
Jokic is a multifaceted talent. A threat from anywhere and everywhere. A player with eyes in the back of his head. Should he have chosen football instead of basketball, he’d be in the Cesc Fabregas mould, with the added goal-scoring threat of Robert Lewandowski.
He’d be Harry Kane.
“Assists make two guys happy. A point only one guy happy,” the giant Serbian has been on record sharing.
“Passing is kind of in my game all my life,” he explained on a different occasion.
“You can see that just with the passing, you can destroy the defence.”
It’s not so much that Jokic is making the easy passes and stat-padding the easy assists; the hand-offs to shooters for threes, the simple lobs.
He’s making the hard ones and the very hard ones. Defences are double teaming him, flailing their arms in the air like those inflatables out the front of car yards, and he’s piercing through them and arrowing the ball into his teammates’ palms like they aren’t even there.
He’s seeing what’s beyond the offensive line, through the defensive coverage, ignoring the onrushing outside linebackers, unafraid of the contact, and slinging the ball for touchdowns. That’s just what he does.
But to suggest Jokic is singlehandedly leading the NBA’s quarterback revolution, fighting the fight against point guards, and Lebron James, for playmaking superiority would be a disservice to the other big men around the league.
In fact, Jokic isn’t even the center used most by his side. Joel Embiid lays claim to that honour. Without James Harden’s ball dominance, Embiid is now involved in 36.1 per cent of Philly’s plays — more than any other player in the league.
The Cameroonian big is rewarding his teammates with buckets, as has been his nature in recent years, but also in dimes.
Former 76ers coach, Doc Rivers, commended his replacement Nick Nurse’s ability to extract more from Embiid’s underused passing.
“Nick has gotten Joel to be a better passer,” Rivers on the Bill Simmons podcast.
In the words of Rasheed Wallace, an notorious non-passing center; ball don’t lie. Neither do the stats.
So far in the 2023-24 season, Embiid is averaging 6.6 assists, enough to be ranked 12th in the league, and is assisting 33.4% of Philly’s buckets when on the court.
He is helped by his teammates, five of whom are shooting 40% or higher from three-point range, and an offensive scheme that has players moving and cutting freely for both personal and collective gains.
76ers coach, Nick Nurse, said of Embiid’s playmaking improvement; ‘he wants to deliver to the open guy.’
There is just one simple caveat to this.
‘The open guy’s got to make the right reads and the cut and all that kind of stuff,’ Nurse said.
For Embiid, that’s just the kind of basketball he loves, and he’s thriving because of it.
“Good basketball to me means cutting, moving, guys getting off the ball, the ball is moving and not sticking,” he said.
Like Jokic, the 76ers big is not just making the easy passes, but also executing the more left-field, defensively off-putting, subtle layoffs. Like Jokic, he has become the fulcrum of his side’s offence.
Like Jokic, he has become his side’s quarterback.
Outside of Embiid and Jokic, the league’s MVPs for the last three years, both Sacramento’s Domantas Sabonis and Alperen Sengun from the Houston Rockets sit inside the NBA’s top 20 for assists per game in the 23-24 season.
By comparison, no center featured in the top 20 for assists per game during the 2014-15 season.
Sabonis, whose father Arvydas was one basketball’s most celebrated ‘quarterbacks’ in the 1990s, leads his team in assists per game this season while also sitting ninth in the league overall.
He might not be the point guard, but within the Kings’ offence he is the creative centrepiece, the man their offence effectively runs through. Shrouded in chaos and movement, Sabonis towers over it all, the calm within the storm, facilitating play and handing off to his peers at near unprecedented rates.
Sengun, who grew up idolising Nikola Jokic, has been dubbed ‘mini-Jokic’ in some corners of the basketball world.
“Our game is similar,” he said on an episode of Podcast P, Paul George’s podcast.
With Sengun’s game comes no-look, over the shoulder arrows, between the leg bounce passes, and everything in between and around the opponent. He is the prototype center for now, and the future.
Such is the Rockets’ center’s talents, head coach Ime Udoka said his play facilitating skillset is one ‘you want to take advantage of.’
Jokic also sung Sengun’s praises: “I think they need to play a little bit more through him,” the Serbian explained.
“This guy has the talent. He can pass the ball. He can post up. He has the touch around the rim. You can see the different moves that he’s made.”
Udoka added that Sengun’s IQ is even higher than you think.
His defence unlocking vision, deftness of passing touch, and silky playmaking brilliance, confirm the NBA’s quarterback revolution is here for the now, and the future.
Much like how QBs have morphed into all-action, multi-threat athletes able to run and pass their way out of trouble, either with traditional techniques or gun-slinging, baseball pitching actions, such as Patrick Mahomes, NBA centers too have levelled up.
They’re now everything and everywhere; a team’s eyes and muscle.
