The Center Position Reinvents Itself
No single player illustrates the personnel shift better than Brook Lopez. Across his first eight NBA seasons, all spent as a back-to-the-basket scorer for the Nets, Lopez attempted a combined 31 three-pointers. In 2016-17, under new Brooklyn coach Kenny Atkinson, he attempted 387, making 134 of them at a 34.6 percent clip. The jump amounted to the largest single-season increase in three-point attempts per game in NBA history, and it did not end his career, it extended it. Lopez went on to anchor Milwaukee's 2021 championship defense while spacing the floor from the perimeter, a role that would have been unthinkable for a center of his size a decade earlier.
Sports analyst Kirk Goldsberry, whose 2019 book Sprawlball used shot-location data to map the change, documented how the midrange area of the floor, once the bread-and-butter zone for post scorers and pull-up shooters alike, had been squeezed to near irrelevance for the league's best offenses. His shot charts showed the floor splitting into two profitable zones, the restricted area and above the three-point line, with the space in between going largely empty on the highest-efficiency teams. Lopez's transformation was an individual player adapting to exactly the trend Goldsberry's maps were describing at a league level.
