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As I was talking to former Memphis Grizzlies players at Marc Gasol’s jersey retirement this weekend, the topic that inevitably came up was just how much the NBA had changed in a dozen years or so. The plodding, post-heavy “Grit N Grind” style of those Memphis teams is scarcely even an option in today’s league … not just because of the 3-point eruption, but because of the demands that revolution has made on the league’s biggest players on the defensive end.

While the object of the game remains the same and the rules have changed less than you think, the tactics and strategy of how to get there have undergone a pretty violent shift. Call it pace-and-space or seven seconds or less or whatever; spreading the floor and shooting 3s has changed the way teams approach the game.

In particular, it has fundamentally changed the center position. For instance, consider the 2006-07 season. Then, a 7-foot-6 Yao Ming averaged 25 points a game and made Second Team All-NBA, with his Houston Rockets ranking sixth in defensive efficiency. The tactical hack to beat him in the playoffs that year was to make him defend free-throw line jumpers by Carlos Boozer.

Yao wasn’t alone; a lot of slow, plodding giants roamed the NBA landscape then, from Cleveland’s 7-3 Zydrunas Ilgauskas to Boston’s 280-pound one-hand shot-faking Al Jefferson to New York’s massive Eddy Curry (who played 2,849 minutes that year!) to the Los Angeles Lakers’ 7-foot, 270-pound teenage sensation Andrew Bynum.

Since then, the league’s persistent creep to the perimeter, and the resultant requirement that all five players be able to guard the perimeter, has steadily eroded the ranks of the behemoth centers. Yes, we still have a lot of tall players, like 7-4 Victor Wembanyama and 7-3 Kristaps Porziņģis, but these guys play more like supersized guards than the human-blocking sleds of yore.

To the extent heavyweights remain, they’ve had to change to stay ahead of the curve. Today, it’s a tiny group that mostly includes elite skill guys. There’s a center who plays more like a point guard (or a warlock) in Nikola Jokić, a jump-shooting, foul-drawing scoring machine in Joel Embiid, and a 3-point-shooting, drop-coverage savant in Brook Lopez … and almost nobody else. Jusuf Nurkić, Boban Marjanović, Andre Drummond and (depending on the day) Zion Williamson are the only other players still in the league whose bodies look like they belong in a 2007 game.

In their stead have been a stream of skinny, tall centers like Wemby, the Zinger and Chet Holmgren; smaller, fast-and-bouncy centers like 6-9 Bam Adebayo and Atlanta’s 6-10 Clint Capela and 6-8 Onyeka Okongwu; and up-gauged former power forwards like Al Horford. Even the traditional 7-footers — your Deandre Aytons, Jarrett Allens, Cody Zellers and Ivica Zubacs — have mostly topped out in the 240-250 pound range. It’s just a much harder game for heavier players, unless they match it with outlier skill and feel the way Jokić, Embiid and Lopez have managed.

This takes us to this year’s NBA Draft, and the two big man sensations competing in the men’s NCAA Tournament championship on Monday night. That duo, Purdue’s Zach Edey and Connecticut’s Donovan Clingan, are two of the most dominant players in recent college annals.

You can see this any number of ways, including, uh, watching the games, but an easy shorthand to see their dominance is the fact that they are first and second in college basketball in PER by miles and miles, with Edey’s unfathomable 39.7 topping the NCAA and Clingan’s 35.7 mark, ranking second. Those are the two highest marks by any NCAA player since Williamson’s 40.8 in 2018-19 at Duke … with the exception of Edey’s 40.2 in 2022-23.

The other standout stat for these two gentlemen is their sheer size. They aren’t just tall; they’re big, with solid frames and thick calves. Edey is 7-4 and 300 pounds; Clingan is 7-2, 280.

And that takes us to the crux of the issue, because we’ve seen this movie before with other dinosaur bigs like Connecticut’s Adama Sanogo and Iowa’s Luka Garza, who were able to dominate college basketball while rarely leaving the paint on defense. That’s not a thing at the NBA level, where the game forces them to cover the perimeter. (Somewhat off topic: Giant bigs are also able to remain in the paint in international rules, which is why Edey is an underutilized weapon for Team Canada and why Clingan’s Italian ancestry is a topic of interest overseas.)

The one thing you can see in the tape for Edey and Clingan is that, if you are going to allow them to just hang out in the paint on defense, you might as well not bother showing up at all. It’s just too easy for them.

Here’s one clip from UConn’s fearsome 30-0 run against Illinois in the Elite Eight. As long as Clingan is in the paint, he is basically playing Nerf hoops against his little brother.

Unbelievably, the Illini shot 0 of 19 on attempts contested by Clingan in that game. While they did make periodic efforts to stretch him out to the 3-point line, they didn’t have the personnel to do it.

A more sincere effort was made by Alabama on Saturday in the Final Four, as the Crimson Tide attacked him with a mobile, 6-10 Grant Nelson. Nelson scored 19 points and was even able to uncork a “dunk” over Clingan that was more of a throw-in but still impressive. However, the more relatable play for the NBA level was probably this one a minute later, where he attacked Clingan off the dribble in space and used some wiggle and a Euro step to get to the rim cleanly.

Nonetheless, Clingan is the more nimble and athletic of the two, showing more ability to step out on the perimeter, run the floor and track smaller players off the dribble. That particularly stood out in his epic eight-block tournament performance against Northwestern, where he was unfazed having to switch onto guards. He’ll have to do the same against faster, more skilled NBA players working with more space and (mostly) better schemes, but here’s an example of his work in the Illinois game. Clingan has his feet at the 3-point line when Terrance Shannon begins his move, stays with Shannon’s inside-out move and slides his feet to meet him at the rim before denying the shot.

Donovan Clingan was credited with 5 blocks on Saturday night

This was not one of the five

What do we think? Did the statkeepers miss this one? pic.twitter.com/mzJMJ1fPZv

— Ryan Cassidy (@ryancassidycbb) April 2, 2024

Meanwhile, Edey is of an even more extreme archetype — even bigger, even slower, even more dependent on being in the right system with a drop coverage on defense and a post-friendly offense.

That said, the Yao parallels here are even stronger. Like Yao, Edey has a high release and is a very good short-range shooter, a combination that makes his post-ups an automatic bucket at the college level. He could probably extend his range too; he shoots 70.6 percent from the free-throw line for his career and has clean mechanics, although he could get more arc on it. Additionally, as opponents have become brazen about doubling him, he’s become better at reading what’s happening and getting the ball to the right spot.

Thus, offense isn’t the thing keeping scouts up at night. Yes, he’ll have to make some adjustments to play in more pick-and-rolls and fewer structured post-ups. Check out this amazing stat: In just 37 college games, he has more post-ups than any player in the NBA this year.

However, his size alone makes him an obvious lob threat, and his coordination, strength and skill on top of that makes him an elite finisher despite lacking electric hops.

Defensively? That is the entire battle. This isn’t necessarily a binary yes-no thing either. There are levels to this.

Edey’s statistical profile certainly has some red flags in it, starting with the fact that he only had 11 steals the entire season, or about 0.5 per 100 possessions. While 7-4 centers aren’t expected to be thieving ball hawks, that’s still a staggeringly low rate even for a center, in a category that has historically had indicator value for the next level.

Eden has also used his size to protect the rim much differently than Clingan, opting for an extreme low risk strategy that prioritizes avoiding foul trouble. Edey has more blocks than fouls this season, just like Clingan; the difference is that Clingan is nearly twice as likely to do either, per possession. The stats will show an unusually low block rate for his size (4.0 per 100), but if Edey isn’t an indispensable star at the next level, it also means he could likely ramp that up quite a bit.

Every game Edey plays in will result in the opponent trying to isolate him in space and use superior speed against his size. (He’ll also be vulnerable in transition.) However, that makes him no different from most centers who take the floor in an NBA game on any given night.

Thus, we get back to levels of vulnerability. It’s one thing to say mobility issues on the defensive end might prevent Edey from becoming a star at the next level, somebody who might be worth a top-five pick. It’s quite another, however, to say the issue would be so egregious that it would render him unplayable, especially given his offensive output.

There are a great many bigs who operate somewhere between those extremes, especially in the regular season, when most teams play drop coverage fairly regularly. Many of those bigs get run off the court at some point in the postseason; if Edey and Clingan are no different from them, that limits the value proposition on taking one with a high lottery pick, perhaps … but it doesn’t make them undraftable. There’s a certain point in the draft where fretting over Edey being played off the court in a playoff series is silliness compared to the upside of having a potential 20-point scorer to plug into the frontcourt.

Of course, we can’t make this too reductive either. In the case of both Clingan and Edey, it isn’t just their size and mobility that impact their pro hopes. Clingan’s medical report will be important given that he’s missed time with multiple foot injuries, for instance. And in Edey’s case, his joining the league at age 22 this fall is a bit of a red flag given that essentially every good center of recent ilk has been picked by age 20.

But in the big picture, the reason to wonder gets back to that Grit N Grind discussion up top. Edey and Clingan are both huge and talented, to be clear, and that gives them a great chance. However, both players are about to face a radical change in conditions, from a college basketball world that is hugely favorable to their player archetype to an NBA environment that couldn’t hardly be more hostile to it. Right now they have a stiff breeze at their backs, but they’re about to tack into the wind.

In turn, how well they fit into the NBA at their size provides a good gauge of exactly how unfavorable the current NBA is to huge, lumbering centers. Because after obliterating the NCAA for the past two seasons, if they can’t cut it at this size, who else possibly could?

(Top photos of Donovan Clingan and Zach Edey: Winslow Townson, Robert Deutsch / USA Today)