Mark Williams Is One Of The Best NBA Players The Casual Has Not Heard Of

The modernisation of the sport of basketball over the last decade or so, driven by the NBA’s analytics movement and its ability to pick nothing but the finest from the worldwide talent pool, has seen the centre position be the most reformed of them all.

The hangovers of the Shaquille O’Neal era – a tour de force in his prime who changed the face of NBA roster construction, as teams stocked players on their roster with the single intent to try and slow Shaq down – meant that the tendency to stock the end of the bench with large but limited seven-footers with decent rebounding rates but little offensive talent and no footspeed with which to defend in space prevailed for a while, even after Shaq lost his edge. However, the pace-and-space evolution, the increased ubiquity of the “ice” pick-and-roll scheme, the sheer irrepressibility of shot-makers such as Stephen Curry and Damian Lillard, and the advent of the data revolution that revealed how inefficient the post-up was as an offensive strategy, have over time seen those post behemoths lose their jobs to more backcourt shooters and playmaking forwards. Everything is about “spacing” and “downhill” now, and not without reason.