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Sports

Andre Drummond Is Special Enough to Make Teams Think Big Again

Drummond sits on his own, as the biggest and baddest man in a league that increasingly values neither of those traits.
Photo by Raj Mehta-USA TODAY Sports

In a game in February 2009, Shaquille O'Neal scored 45 points against the Toronto Raptors. He would never score that many points in a game again, and was likely the high-water mark of O'Neal's career after he left Miami, where he won his fourth and final title. After that game, Raptors forward Chris Bosh noted that O'Neal was able to have so much success because he was camping out in the lane, with the officials ignoring three-second violations. To Bosh, it was simply an observation. To Shaq, it was a complaint.

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"I heard what Chris Bosh said," said O'Neal, then a member of the Phoenix Suns, "and those are strong words coming from the RuPaul of big men."

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The implication, however politically incorrect (notwithstanding other ways in which O'Neal was incorrect), was that Bosh was soft. His offensive game was based on the perimeter. In the eyes of The Big Aristotle, Bosh was not a true big man. That title required banging in the paint, boxing out for rebounds, and being hacked relentlessly because his strength would be too much to handle.

Almost seven years later, and Bosh looks rather large. It is not as if he has taken his game inside—in fact, since leaving Toronto, he has only continued to move his game outside and was invited to participate in the three-point contest before pulling out of All-Star Weekend—in the intervening years. Judging by the way the league is going, however, with the positionless, jump-shooting, perimeter-based Golden State Warriors the rage of the NBA, Bosh stands tall these days. He is, whether Shaq agrees or not, a big man. It is just that the meaning of that term has changed.

"Hey look, man: Big men, we're the last of a dying breed," Bosh said during All-Star Weekend. "It was good to see Big Andre Drummond here, man. It's crazy. They took the centre out of the vote, and now it's all guards."

Ah, yes: Drummond, the glass-cleaning, rim-eating Detroit Pistons behemoth. He was an anomaly during All-Star Weekend. As Bosh mentioned, the league no longer insists that a center be voted into the game by the fans, instead making the two starting lineups consist of two backcourt players and three frontcourt players. The six players who started up front for the All-Star Game: LeBron James, Paul George, Carmelo Anthony, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant and Kawhi Leonard. None of them are taller than 6'9", and none are heavier than James' listed 250 pounds. They are all, to use the language of simpler times, small forwards.

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Even when the big men get, well, bigger in the coaches' and commissioners' selections, the games stay more varied than traditional bigs like Drummond. Bosh, Paul Millsap, Al Horford, Pau Gasol, Anthony Davis, DeMarcus Cousins and LaMarcus Aldridge can all shoot the jumper with at least a foot on the arc, and sometimes further back. Drummond is the lone giant whose main purpose is to eat space, attract attention when he rolls to the hoop and deny drives on the other end. Today's game is all about speed, spacing and shooting.

"This is a new generation of the game," Drummond said before competing in the slam dunk competition. (In that event, being a big man is less sexy than ever, too.) "Everyone wants to see the smaller lineups play.

"I watched a lot of Shaq, Amar'e Stoudemire, Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar), Shawn Kemp. He was my favourite player. I loved to watch him, too. Dwight Howard, he was another of my favourite players going up, too. I try to model my game after those guys."

The NBA is moving away from players like Drummond—unless they're as good as Drummond is. —Photo by Raj Mehta-USA TODAY Sports

Will that lineage die with Drummond, though? There is no denying that the Pistons have been successful using him. They are significantly better on both ends of the floor with him on the court than with him off of it. That, however, does not ultimately mean much: The Pistons have not experimented much with smaller lineups, and Drummond's combination of size and athleticism, recalling Howard at his prime, is not duplicated around the league. The Pistons play the way they do, with a cavalcade of 3-point shooters surrounding Drummond, specifically because they have Drummond.

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And Drummond is special, and worth bucking the league's main trend for. He is scoring and rebounding at the highest rates of his career, and is the best on the glass in the league. The Pistons are just outside the playoff picture at a game under .500, but better than most observers expected. And Stan Van Gundy is building around Drummond like he built around Howard in Orlando. Most teams around the league, whether they have a legitimately talented big or not, at least have some of those traditional big men on their roster. Even the Warriors, who are leading the small-ball movement, have Andrew Bogut and Festus Ezeli, and just scooped up Anderson Varejao.

Still, you cannot help but feel that the world is moving away from players like Drummond—unless they're as good as Drummond is.

"I think obviously that there are still a lot of good big men in the league," said Golden State's Draymond Green, the "centre" in the Warriors' ultra-small, ultra-successful lineup. "That's not going to change. I think just the of play we've played, we've had success with it. It's always going to create that conversation and make it a discussion if someone has success with something. It's just like if everyone was super big and that worked. They'd say, 'Oh, small ball would never work.' Prior to us being successful with it, that's the way it was."

"With time, with a lot of the bigs that are coming out—Karl-Anthony Towns, you've got Jahlil Okafor—and those young bigs will come in and (the big men) are going to start coming back," Drummond added.

As for his game being out of these days? "I don't control what the NBA does. All I can do is play hard. It's based on what the fans choose. It's up to them."

For now, Drummond sits on his own, as the biggest and baddest man in a league that increasingly values neither of those traits.