I have a question for both college And NBA Basketball fans: When was the last time a team won anything with a big man in the low post as the No. 1 option? Purdue’s Zach Edey will be bringing home a treasure trove of hardware, and luckily for him, he’ll be at his home making sure no one poaches trophies on his doorstep. The Boilermakers became the second No. 1 seed to lose to a 16 seed in the NCAA Tournament, and congratulations to Fairleigh Dickinson.
If you thought upstarts couldn’t get more eccentric, let me introduce you to the Knights of Teaneck, New Jersey. Coach Tobin Anderson called his shot the day before the game, and his centerless rotation swarmed, frustrated and harassed Purdue all night. The Boilermakers’ inability to secure a split allowed you to tell the game was going to come down to a clutch play at the end.
Forward Sean Moore delivered said play, conceding a three with just over a minute left to give the Knights a five-point lead. The final 60-plus ticks were agonizing for both fanbases before Fairleigh Dickinson sealed the win with a pair of free throws to end the score at 63-58.
This March is unlike any other as it’s the first time a No. 1 and No. 2 seed have both lost in the first round. Arizona, whose big men also groped message streams and iso contacts, fell at Princeton on Thursday, and if your parenthesis is still intact, I have a few belongings I’d like you to bless.
So congratulations to Fairleigh Dickinson on the win as well as the upset of Gradey Dick as the entity most likely to conjure up a dick joke that my editors will cut.
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Don’t believe in the return of the big man until a big non-unicorn wins something
Despite all the hype that Nikola Jokić and Joel Embiid got, neither was at the NBA Finals. You could tell me about how important Drew Timme was to Gonzaga when the Bulldogs faced Baylor in the title game in 2021. Yet the last team to finish atop the heap in March with a true low-post big man inasmuch as player of the tournament was Sean May of North Carolina or Emeka Okafor of UConn in 2005 and 2004 respectively. Kentucky won with Anthony Davis in 2012, but he resisted playing center his entire professional career.
We have to go back to 2005 or 2006 in the NBA. Tim Duncan was the Finals MVP in 2005, and 2006 was the Heat-Mavericks’ first Finals. Dwyane Wade won the Finals MVP, but Shaquille O’Neal was still such a force that the offense revolved around threatening him around the hoop.
We have reached the point in basketball as a sport where centers cannot be limited to paint skills. If a tall can’t space the floor, handle the ball, or play, he’s reduced to blocking shots and catching lobs.
The closest thing to an old-school NBA franchise center is Embiid, and the jury is out as it remains to be seen if he can be the focal point of a title chase. Jokić plods along, but the overtake is so advanced that calling him a center is an insult. Either way, his most consistent playoff success came with Jamal Murray as a critical-time 1A.
Experts have called Giannis Antetokuonmpo a modern day Shaq, but that’s not fair. The Greek Freak is a unicorn in the truest sense of the word, who isn’t just a tall man with guard skills, but rather a tall man who moves like a guard.
Shaq was one of them, but even he moved superbly for someone his size. That’s why I’m not sure O’Neal can be played off the pitch in any era. Usually it was he who forced personnel changes. We haven’t seen this kind of low gravitational pull since Duncan, and I don’t think we’ll ever see it again.
Not only is basketball an overly skilled sport for one-note big men, but relying on another position to feed you the ball is ridiculous. Each entry pass to Edey met two to three defenders, and although he finished with 21 points and 15 rebounds, Purdue’s approach was antiquated.
Why am I saying this? I find that I remember things best when I write them down, so the next time I go to make a big proclamation (or fill in a parenthesis) I’ll think three times about supporting a team whose attack depends on a big man.