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Tim MacMahon, ESPN Staff Writer
EIGHT MONTHS AGO, late in the evening on Feb. 29, a nine-second sequence played out in what could have been considered a glimpse into the future of the center position in the NBA.
The Oklahoma City Thunder were in town to face the San Antonio Spurs, a marquee matchup between the rookie big men: two of the game’s brightest young stars, Victor Wembanyama and Chet Holmgren.
With 3:29 left in the fourth quarter and the Spurs up six, the 7-foot-4 Frenchman swooped in to contest a layup at the rim, ripped down the rebound, tossed an outlet pass to point guard Tre Jones and trotted 12 strides up the Frost Bank Center floor before getting the ball back.
His size 20½ right foot standing on the black paint of the Spurs’ midcourt logo, the big man didn’t hesitate. He launched a rainbow, 28-foot trey.
Swish.
It was a revelation as much as a vision for 5s across the league. Except for one detail: The Spurs didn’t even officially consider him a center, listing him as a forward even after scrapping the idea of starting the 6-foot-11 Zach Collins alongside him.
“He’s not really a 5,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said earlier in the season, referring to Wembanyama’s skill set, which stretches far beyond the prototypical center’s. “He’s the one big guy out there.”
Wembanyama and Holmgren are multifaceted, extreme examples of a modern big-man archetype: 7-footers who protect the rim on defense and can space the floor as 3-point threats offensively. They impact the most valuable real estate in basketball — the paint — on both ends of the floor, clogging that territory as elite shot blockers and opening driving and cutting lanes for teammates simply by standing 25-plus feet from the hoop.
These two face off again on Wednesday as the Thunder host the Spurs (9:30 p.m. ET, ESPN).
“If you can play defense and shoot the ball, you can pretty much play on any court anywhere,” Holmgren told ESPN. “Those are two things that are always needed on the basketball court, and that’s kind of where the foundation of my game started.”
WEMBANYAMA AND HOLMGREN are the extreme extension of the big-man evolution, but a different big man serves as its foundation.
Brook Lopez didn’t look like a trendsetter during his first eight seasons in the NBA. He was in the process of becoming the Brooklyn Nets‘ all-time leading scorer, but he had an old-school offensive game. He did most of his damage as a back-to-the-basket scorer, as you’d expect from a 7-foot-1, 282-pound lottery pick, although he had a soft enough touch to be an effective midrange option on pick-and-pops.
Lopez’s game changed drastically in 2016-17, his ninth season in the league and last in Brooklyn. The Nets had hired Kenny Atkinson as their new head coach, and he insisted on Lopez shooting from 3-point range.
It might have seemed like an odd request of a center who had gone 3-of-24 from beyond the arc in his career to that point, but Atkinson intended to implement the five-out offensive scheme the Atlanta Hawks had successfully utilized while he was an assistant on Mike Budenholzer’s coaching staff. Al Horford had made a similar shift in his shot diet the previous season for the Hawks.
“[Atkinson] gave me great confidence to just keep shooting it in-game and work up that trust,” Lopez told ESPN. “And from there, obviously it just kept snowballing and ballooning over time.”
Lopez launched 387 3s that season, making a respectable 34.6% of them. He continued firing away after the rebuilding Nets traded Lopez to the Los Angeles Lakers. The league as a whole wasn’t quite sure what to make of Lopez’s midcareer transformation, allowing the Milwaukee Bucks to sign him to a one-year bargain deal for the league’s biannual exception.
Milwaukee had just hired Budenholzer, who figured Lopez could be an ideal fit in the five-out system alongside blossoming superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo. “Splash Mountain,” the nickname bestowed on the Disney-loving Lopez, was a smashing success in Milwaukee. The Bucks made a 16-win improvement to leap to 60 wins and the top seed in the Eastern Conference.
Some 340 miles away, in Minneapolis, a 16-year-old Holmgren was developing his own game. And across the Atlantic, in the outskirts of Paris, a 14-year-old Wembanyama was doing the same.
Lopez launched 512 3s in that 2018-19 season, the most ever by a 7-footer, making 187 (36.5%). Lopez often spent offensive possessions stationed several feet above the 3-point line, pulling the opposing big man far from the paint or forcing the other team’s coach to make difficult matchup decisions. Lopez learned to embrace impacting games even when he didn’t touch the ball for several possessions in a row.
Lopez also served as a dominant anchor of the league’s top-rated defense. The Bucks typically played “drop” coverage in pick-and-rolls, keeping Lopez around the rim as much as possible. He swatted 179 shots — still the only season in NBA history that a player had at least 175 made 3s and 175 blocked shots.
“They’re contrasting ways of changing the game, right?” Lopez said. “When you’re clogging the paint, you’re almost in every single play. You’re always right there. Everyone can see you right by the basket. You’re hitting someone, always a part of something, but on the opposite end, it’s interesting to just stand there and watch.
“You just got to keep that trust. For me, that was probably one of the things at the beginning where it was like, ‘Whoa, I’m just supposed to keep standing here.’ But it kept working.”
Lopez has been a critical component of the Bucks’ success since then, signing a pair of long-term deals to stay in Milwaukee and helping to bring Brew City its first NBA championship in 50 years. Half of his field goal attempts in a Bucks uniform have come from beyond the arc.
Lopez was an anomaly early in his Milwaukee tenure. He has plenty of company now. Of the 12 players who blocked at least 100 shots last season, half of them also made at least 100 3s: Wembanyama, Holmgren, Lopez, Boston’s Kristaps Porzingis, Indiana’s Myles Turner and Memphis’ Jaren Jackson Jr., the lone power forward on the list.
A decade ago, such production from centers felt like a foreign idea. Now, when scouting big men, teams attempt to project whether 7-footers can develop into capable “stretch 5s.” That applies even to a premier lob finisher such as Dallas Mavericks sophomore Dereck Lively II or a post-up bully such as Memphis Grizzlies rookie Zach Edey, both of whom incorporate 3-point shooting into their daily post-practice routines.
“You’ll always have a job. That’s a big thing,” Turner told ESPN, referring to rim protectors who possess 3-point range. He made a career-high 116 3s last season while blocking 144 shots, his seventh straight 100-block season, for the East finalist Pacers.
“I think that as you go more and more in your career or later in your career, when you lose a little bit of your athletic ability, you still have the ability to shoot the ball and flick the wrist. I think that more than anything, bigs coming in and watching, seeing guys like myself, seeing the Brook Lopezes, it’s just good coming to the league knowing that it’s possible.”
THE FLOOR-SPACING, shot-swatting center archetype is reaching new heights because Wembanyama and Holmgren are so uniquely skilled for their size.
Start on the defensive end, where they immediately established themselves as dominant forces.
“The first impression I had of him that really jumped out, I’d probably take it for granted now, is his closing speed on balls,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said of Holmgren. “There’s plays that you don’t think he can get to, and then it’s like he’s a praying mantis. He is just on top of the ball out of nowhere.”
Holmgren, who defends well enough in space to allow Daigneault to employ a wide variety of coverage schemes, blocked 190 shots last season. That ranked a distant second in the league behind Wembanyama, who had 254 blocks, the most by any player in eight seasons.
But it’s their diverse offensive potential that really separates Holmgren and Wembanyama from other shot-blocking centers, even those such as Lopez and Turner, who are comfortable shooting from long range.
“Man, they’re freaks of nature,” Turner said. “They’re very, very talented. I look at someone like Wemby, he’s just a tall guard. It’s bigs that want to be guards, you know what I mean?”
These are the rare big men equipped with deep “bags.” Nobody in NBA history ever had at least 100 made 3s, 150 blocks and 200 assists in a season until Holmgren and Wembanyama both did so as rookies. They were also the only players in the league with at least 125 dunks and 3s.
“It’s cool to see honestly, because there’s just so much they can do already and they’re just getting started in their careers,” Lopez said. “There’s not really anything they can’t do. They handle the ball so well. They move great. To see already what they’re doing is pretty special. So just to think about all the potential they have, it’s exciting to see centers who are capable of doing all those things.”
There were questions about whether Holmgren and Wembanyama could — or should — play center as they entered the league, because of their versatile skill sets and skinny frames. While Wembanyama opened his career at power forward, Holmgren played solely center as a rookie for an Oklahoma City team that became the youngest No. 1 seed in NBA history.
The Thunder experimented with lineups featuring 7-foot, 190-pounder Aleksej Pokusevski at center during the 2022-23 season, when Holmgren sat out with a foot injury, in preparation for their prized lottery pick’s delayed rookie year. Oklahoma City determined that the offensive benefits of having Holmgren play center outweighed the rebounding challenges.
“It’s all about putting other teams in a dilemma where if they want to take something away, they’re giving up something else,” Holmgren said late last season, when he averaged 16.5 points while shooting 53% from the floor and 37% from 3-point range. “If you’re too one-dimensional, then they can just take that away and say, ‘Beat us doing something else,’ and there’s nothing else that’s effective with it. … So just kind of figuring out how to counter whatever, whatever’s thrown at you.”
Oklahoma City made a significant investment in a bulkier 7-footer this summer, signing Isaiah Hartenstein to a three-year, $87 million deal. Holmgren’s perimeter skills make playing the two big men together a plausible option, although the discovery process on how the rotation will work with the 7-foot tandem is on hold while Hartenstein recovers from a broken left hand that will sideline him for at least the first month of the season.
In the meantime, Holmgren more than held his own against three-time MVP Nikola Jokic in the Thunder’s season-opening win. He had 25 points, 14 rebounds, 5 assists and 4 blocks in the victory (despite missing all five of his 3-point attempts). He has averaged 23.7 points, 13.0 rebounds, 3.0 assists and a league-leading 4.0 blocks during the Thunder’s 3-0 start.
Wembanyama, who doesn’t have the luxury of playing with a superstar guard such as Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, averaged 21.4 points as a rookie but wasn’t nearly as efficient as Holmgren. Wembanyama shot only 46.5% from the floor and 32.5% from 3-point range while committing the third-most turnovers in the league.
The inefficiency was in large part due to the Spurs’ willingness to allow their prodigy to experiment and expand the limits of his game. He spent some of his summer working out with Jamal Crawford, the three-time Sixth Man of the Year who was known for his ankle-breaking ballhandling ability, to continue evolving his dribbling skills. The Spurs also recruited Chris Paul, the veteran point guard who ranks third on the all-time assists list, in free agency in part to make sure Wembanyama gets the ball in the spots he should. San Antonio doesn’t want to put limits, or positional labels, on Wembanyama.
“I don’t see the game really evolving into a position-based game,” Wembanyama said this month. “Just as we see now, you have Jokic playing point guard sometimes. So, I think teams are going to figure out more and more what’s the [best] way to use a player to his strengths. Honestly, I don’t know how it’s going to go.
“But hopefully, we can see a big variety of players emerging and of course, the prototypes like these are going to happen more and more.”
In the opening minutes of his 29-point performance in Saturday’s win over the Houston Rockets, Wembanyama got the ball a couple of steps over half court as Dillon Brooks guarded him. Julian Champagnie set a screen to force a switch, giving Wembanyama a bit of breathing room.
Wembanyama took one dribble to his left and casually let a 29-footer fly from the logo. Houston point guard Fred VanVleet, who was at a 14-inch height disadvantage, had no hope of contesting the shot.
Swish.
ESPN’s Michael C. Wright contributed to this story.