Big Men Can Shoot Now, and the NBA Will Never Be the Same

Let's set the scene. It's 2010. Your center catches the ball 25 feet from the basket. The crowd tenses. The coach grabs the clipboard. The opposing defender doesn't even bother closing out — he just waits, knowing full well that shot isn't going in.

Flash forward to today. That same scenario ends with a different result. The center catches, rises, fires, and splashes it. The defense scrambles. The floor opens up. The offense runs freely. And the league is fundamentally, permanently different because of it.

The shooting center isn't a novelty anymore. It's a weapon. And the teams without one are already behind.

The Old World Order

For most of NBA history, the center position was defined by proximity to the basket. Patrick Ewing. Hakeem Olajuwon. Shaquille O'Neal. These were men who operated in the paint, drew double-teams, and finished with force. Their value was measured in post touches, rebounds, and blocked shots. A center who drifted to the perimeter wasn't stretching the defense — he was wasting a possession.

The offensive architecture around those big men reflected their limitations. Guards and wings created off the dribble while the center set screens, rolled to the rim, and cleaned up misses. It was efficient enough. But it was also predictable, and it left massive portions of the floor functionally unused.

Then the three-point revolution arrived, the pace-and-space era kicked the door in, and everything the NBA thought it knew about building a roster got thrown in the recycling bin.

The Pioneers Who Broke the Mold

Credit where it's due: a handful of big men saw this coming before most coaches and front offices did.

Dirk Nowitzki is the obvious starting point. Yes, he was technically a power forward, but what Dirk did to defensive schemes in the early 2000s rewrote the rulebook for what a big man could offer offensively. His ability to pull defenders away from the paint and knock down mid-range and deep shots created driving lanes that his teammates — and eventually the whole league — learned to exploit.

Krisaps Porzingis extended the idea further into the arc. At 7'3", Porzingis shooting threes wasn't just a gimmick — it was a structural problem for opposing defenses. Who do you send to contest that shot? Your center, who then vacates the paint? Your guard, who gets backed down immediately if Porzingis decides to drive instead?

But the player who arguably accelerated this evolution more than anyone else is Karl-Anthony Towns. KAT came into the league in 2015 already capable of knocking down threes with genuine consistency. He shot over 40% from deep in multiple seasons. For a legitimate seven-footer anchoring an offense, that number is almost unfair.

What the Data Actually Says

The statistical shift across the center position over the past decade is stark. In the 2013-14 season, centers attempting more than two threes per game were essentially unicorns — you could count them on one hand. By the 2022-23 season, that number had multiplied several times over, and the league average three-point attempt rate for big men had roughly doubled.

More importantly, the accuracy improved alongside the volume. Early shooting experiments from big men often produced ugly percentages — guys hoisting threes because coaches told them to, not because they had the mechanics to make it work. The current generation, though, is different. Players like Brook Lopez, Myles Turner, and Nikola Jokic (in his own gravity-warping way) are legitimate perimeter threats whose shooting grades hold up under scrutiny.

The competitive advantage is quantifiable. Teams with a center shooting 35% or better from three generate significantly more open looks for their guards and wings — because a defender can no longer park their big in the paint as a free safety. Every time a shooting center pulls his man to the arc, it's one less body clogging the lane. Over a full season, that translates directly to easier twos, more free throws, and better overall offensive efficiency.

The Defensive Domino Effect

Here's what often gets overlooked in this conversation: the shooting center didn't just change offense. It dismantled traditional defensive strategy.

The drop coverage — where a big man sags into the paint to protect the rim while a guard fights over a screen — became a liability the moment opposing centers could hit shots from the elbow or beyond. If your center is camping in the paint while their center is standing at the three-point line, you've just handed the offense a wide-open look every single time the ball swings.

Teams scrambled to adapt. Switch-heavy schemes became more popular partly as a response to shooting bigs, but switching a guard onto a 7-footer creates its own nightmare. Help rotations got more complicated. And suddenly, every defensive game plan required a specific answer to the question: what do we do when their center catches it on the perimeter?

There's no clean answer. That's the point.

What Championship Contention Looks Like Now

Look at the rosters that have competed for titles in the past five years, and a pattern emerges. The teams with legitimate shooting threats at the five — whether that's Lopez in Milwaukee, Jokic in Denver, or Al Horford stretching the floor in Boston — consistently generate cleaner offensive sets and force defenses into impossible decisions.

The teams without that weapon are forced to compensate elsewhere, and it shows in the numbers. Paint-bound centers are still valuable — rim protection and rebounding matter — but their offensive limitations create predictable schemes that elite defenses can solve.

Front offices have noticed. The market for shooting bigs has inflated dramatically. A center who can shoot 36% from three and also protect the rim commands max-contract conversations. A decade ago, that same player might have been a mid-level guy.

The Next Chapter

If the current generation of shooting centers transformed the game, the next wave might break it entirely. Young bigs coming out of college now are trained as perimeter players from day one. The idea of a center who can't at least threaten from mid-range is already starting to feel archaic.

The five-man position isn't going away — but the version of it that existed in 2005 is gone, and it's not coming back. The paint is still important. But the three-point line? That's where the position lives now.

And at Point3.net, we'd argue that's the most interesting development in professional basketball in the last 20 years.