CBS: Big Men Breakdown

[jonathanlambert33]

I'd highly recommend this article to everyone, it's a great breakdown of the bigs and includes a chart that rates all the top bigs from 1-10 in the important stuff like post offense, post defense, help defense, offensive rebounding, defensive rebounding, etc.

Aside from guys like Roy Hibbert, Andrew Bynum and Brook Lopez, the traditional center is a rarity in today's NBA. For the first 50 or so years of the NBA's existence, help defense was really hard to execute because you weren't allowed to cheat over. You either had to sprint away from the man you were guarding on the perimeter or hope to sneak in quickly along the baseline to bother a post player. More often than not, the centers and power forwards of the past had plenty of room to operate and dominate on the low block.

That's not the case anymore, and this year's crop of draft prospects show you a lot of where the NBA has gone to and where it's headed with the modern big man. The modern big man has to move his feet, be deadly in the pick-and-roll (even though guys like Dwight Howard refuse to acknowledge that's where they're at their best) on both ends of the floor and be a help defender that is in position far before he needs to be.

With the 2013 NBA Draft class, there aren't any dominant prospects at the power forward and center positions, but we do see plenty of big men that fit the mold of today's NBA giants and could provide a lot of help down the road for the team that drafts them. From Nerlens Noel to Alex Len to Mason Plumlee to Rudy Gobert, there are lots of things to like about this crop of big men as long as you're willing to be patient and let them develop a skill set that matches today's league.

In hopes of trying to see who looks most ready to play the role of the mobile big man in the NBA, I came up with 10 categories (post offense, post defense, ability to play in the high post, pick-and-roll defense, help defense, pass out of the double team, offensive rebounding, defensive rebounding, pick-and-roll offense and potential to have a dominant skill set) to attempt to project which areas these big men are proficient in now and which ones they need help in cultivating.

Below are the scores of the top 10 big men in the draft class, the key to that scoring system, and an explanation for what the player needs work on and what they're good at doing.

http://www.cbssports.com/nba/blog/eye-on-basketball/22522527/2013-nba-draft-which-big-man-looks-the-best-for-todays-game