Center in Basketball: What the Five Does at Both Ends
The center in basketball is the NBA's rim protector, rebounder and lead screener. What the 5 does at each end, and the rules rewritten because of big men.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NBA Positions & Strategy26 min read
- Position number
- 5
- Height of the rim
- 10 feet
- NBA lane width
- 16 feet since 1964
- Blocks first recorded by the NBA
- 1973-74
In December 1949 the marquee outside Madison Square Garden read "Geo. Mikan vs. Knicks." Two years later the NBA doubled the width of the free throw lane to push Mikan away from the basket. No other position in American sports has had so much of the rulebook written against it, and the reason is the job itself: the center, the 5, is usually the tallest player in the lineup and works closer to the rim than anyone else at both ends of the floor.
On defense he protects the basket and rebounds. On offense he sets the screens, rolls to the hoop and finishes what the guards create. That is the answer in the NBA, the WNBA and college basketball alike, though none of their rulebooks says so, because positions are a coaching convention and the rules only count five players. Everything below is the detail: how a center defends a rim he cannot simply stand under, why his screens matter more than his shots, and how seven men from Mikan to Nikola Jokic each changed what the job could include.
What the center does: the job of the 5 in one paragraph
The center is the player whose position on the floor is defined by the basket. Guards and forwards are described by where they stand relative to each other; the 5 is described by how near he is to a ring 10 feet off the ground. At the defensive end he is the last body between a driver and that ring, the man who contests shots in the lane, takes the rebound and tells four teammates in front of him what is coming. At the offensive end he screens for the ball handler, dives to the rim, catches lobs, puts back misses and, depending on his skills, scores with his back to the basket or passes from the middle of the floor.
| End of the floor | Core duty | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Defense | Rim protection | Contesting layups and dunks without fouling |
| Defense | Coverage calls | Shouting out screens and the scheme from behind the play |
| Defense | Defensive rebounding | Boxing out the opposing big and ending the possession |
| Offense | Screening | Setting the ball screen that starts most half-court sets |
| Offense | Finishing | Rolling to the rim for a pass, a lob or a put-back |
| Offense | Offensive rebounding | Extending a possession after a missed shot |
Notice what is missing from the table. Scoring from the post, passing and outside shooting are all things particular centers do, and the last three sections of this page before the history are about them. But a team can win with a center who does none of those and all six of the items listed. The reverse is rarely true.
The job is the same in outline across the American game, with differences in the dimensions. The NBA and WNBA lane is 16 feet wide; the college and high school lane is 12. The NBA also has a defensive three-second rule that college basketball lacks, which changes how a center may stand in the paint. Unless stated otherwise, this page describes the NBA. For how the 5 fits beside the other four spots, see our overview of the five positions from point guard to center.
Rim protection: contesting shots without fouling and the verticality principle
A blocked shot is the least important thing a rim protector does. That sounds perverse, and it is the first thing coaches teach.
The NBA did not record blocks at all until the 1973-74 season, which is why Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, by every account the two best shot blockers of their time, have no official totals. Russell's method is the one still taught. He did not swat the ball into the seats, which stops the play and gives it back to the offense. He tipped it to a teammate or kept it in play, turning the block into the first pass of a fast break.
- 17Most in one game, Elmore Smith in 1973
- 5.56Highest season average, Mark Eaton in 1984-85
- 3830Career total, Hakeem Olajuwon
Official records from 1973-74, when the NBA began counting blocks, through the 2024-25 season. Players before that date have no official totals.
Verticality
The offense is allowed to jump into a defender. The defender is allowed to be there. The principle that reconciles the two is called verticality, and it is written into the NBA's guidance on contact: a defender who has established a legal position may jump straight up, arms extended straight overhead, and if a shooter crashes into him, the contact is not a defensive foul. The moment he leans forward, brings his arms down or jumps toward the shooter, the protection is gone.
Roy Hibbert of the Indiana Pacers built the league's best defense on it in 2012-13 and 2013-14. He rarely tried to block the shot. He went up straight, made himself a wall more than nine feet tall, and let the driver work out how to score over it. The four-foot arc under the basket does not interfere with this, because the restricted area limits where a defender can draw a charge and says nothing against a vertical contest. Our page on what the arc under the basket does covers the distinction.
Deterrence
The larger effect is on shots that never happen. A guard who beats his man and sees a 7-footer waiting will often stop short and take a floater or a 12-foot pull-up, both of which go in far less often than a layup. Or he passes. One shot blocker therefore changes where five opponents are willing to shoot, and the change does not appear in his own statistics at all.
Voters have understood this for a long time. The Defensive Player of the Year award was first given for 1982-83, and through the 2024-25 season three men had won it four times: Dikembe Mutombo, Ben Wallace and Rudy Gobert. All three were centers.
Anchoring the defense: calling out screens and playing drop, hedge or switch
He is the only defender who can see everything. The four players in front of the center are watching the ball or their own men, often with their backs to the screen that is about to hit them. The center, on the back line, faces the whole play. So he talks. "Screen left." "Ice." "Switch." A good defensive center is loud for forty-eight minutes, and coaches value that as highly as the blocks. Tyson Chandler and Marc Gasol, Defensive Player of the Year in 2012 and 2013, were both known as much for organizing a defense with their voices as for anything in the box score.
The center's own decision comes on the pick and roll, which he defends dozens of times a night as the man guarding the screener. There are four standard answers.
| Coverage | What the center does | What it concedes |
|---|---|---|
| Drop | Retreats toward the rim and keeps both the ball and the roller in front of him | The pull-up jump shot behind the screen |
| Hedge or show | Jumps out high to stop the ball handler for a beat, then sprints back to his man | A pass over the top to the rolling big |
| Switch | Trades assignments and guards the ball handler himself | A quick guard attacking a slower center one on one |
| Blitz or trap | Joins the on-ball defender in a hard double team | A four-against-three behind the trap |
Drop is the traditional center's coverage because it keeps him where he is most useful. It gives up the mid-range jumper, which defenses generally want an offense to take, and it protects the basket. The weakness is a guard who can make that pull-up from three-point range, and the whole trade is examined in our piece on why drop coverage gives up the jumper to save the rim.
Switching asks something different. A center who switches has to slide his feet with a point guard 25 feet from the hoop, with nobody behind him to protect the rim if he is beaten. Teams that switch everything want a 5 who can do that, and there are few of them.
The three-second count on defense
One rule shapes all of it. Since 2001-02, when the NBA dropped its ban on zone defenses, a defender may not stay in the lane for more than three seconds unless he is within arm's length of an opponent and actively guarding him. The penalty is a technical foul: one free throw, and the offense keeps the ball. A center in drop coverage is therefore constantly stepping one foot out of the paint and back in, resetting the count. The details are in our guide to the defensive three-second rule and how it is counted.
College basketball has no such rule. An NCAA center may stand in front of the rim for an entire possession, which is one reason zone defenses built around a shot blocker are so much more common on Saturdays than in the pros.
Rebounding at both ends: boxing out, tip-outs and what an extra possession is worth
Three of the four leading rebounders in NBA history were centers, and the fourth, Elvin Hayes, split his career between center and power forward. The top two played in the same era, against each other.
Chamberlain took 55 rebounds in a single game against Russell's Celtics on November 24, 1960, a record that has not been approached in the modern game. Totals like these are partly a product of their period. Teams in the early 1960s played faster and shot a lower percentage, so there were many more missed shots to collect. They are also a product of two men who were simply better at it than anyone before or since.
Boxing out the other big
At the defensive end the center's assignment is usually the opposing center, the most dangerous offensive rebounder on the floor. When the shot goes up, he turns, finds that man with a forearm, puts his back into him and holds the space until the ball arrives. Often he does not get the rebound himself. A guard or a forward swoops in to take the ball that the center's box out made available, and the center's rebounding total undersells what he did.
The defense wins this contest most of the time. Across the league, the defending team collects roughly three of every four missed shots in the modern NBA, because its players start between their men and the basket.
The offensive glass and the tip-out
The other one in four is where a center changes a game. An NBA possession is worth, on average, a little more than one point. An offensive rebound is a new possession that the offense did nothing to earn except miss, and it frequently begins with the ball two feet from the rim against a defense that is out of position. The put-back that follows is among the highest-percentage shots in the sport. Even when no put-back is available, the shot clock resets to 14 seconds if fewer than that remain, under a rule the NBA adopted for 2018-19.
So a center who takes three or four offensive rebounds a night is handing his team three or four extra chances to score, in a league where games are routinely decided by fewer points than that.
Some centers do not even need to secure the ball. Tyson Chandler, with Dallas and then New York, made a specialty of the tip-out: unable to catch a rebound cleanly in a crowd, he would bat it with one hand back toward the perimeter, where a guard picked it up and the offense reset. Moses Malone, the NBA's career leader in offensive rebounds since the league began counting them, collected so many of his own misses that the miss-and-put-back became a recognized part of his scoring.
The cost is at the other end. A center who chases the offensive glass is not running back, and coaches weigh the extra possession against the fast break it may concede.
Screening and rolling: the ball screen, the dive, the lob and the short roll
For most NBA centers, this is the offense. They may go a whole game without a play being called for them to score, and still be involved in forty or fifty possessions as the man who sets the screen that starts everything.
- Sprint into the screenThe center runs to the ball handler's defender so that his own defender arrives late and out of position.
- Set it wide and stillFeet apart, arms in, no movement at contact. A screen that leans or slides is an offensive foul.
- Open toward the ballHe pivots so that his chest faces the ball handler and his hands are ready for a pass.
- DiveHe runs straight down the lane, pulling his own defender and a helper from the weak side toward the rim.
- CatchA bounce pass through the gap, or a lob thrown above the rim where only he can reach it.
- Finish or move itHe dunks, or stops short at the foul line and passes to a shooter the help defender left.
The basic sequence of a ball screen from the screener's side. Each step takes a second or less, and the read at the end depends on how the defense reacts.
The screen itself is unglamorous and decisive. A center who makes solid contact frees the ball handler by a full step; one who arrives late or sets a narrow screen frees nobody. The NBA's hustle statistics now count "screen assists," screens that lead directly to a made basket, an acknowledgment that the work has value even though the screener never touches the ball. How the action works from the guard's side is covered in our explainer on the pick and roll and the coverages against it.
Vertical spacing
The roll does something that shooting cannot. A shooter in the corner stretches the defense horizontally. A center running to the rim with his hand up stretches it vertically, because a lob thrown to a spot eleven feet in the air can be caught by one player on the floor. The defender guarding him cannot step up at the ball without conceding a dunk behind him.
The Los Angeles Clippers of the early 2010s were nicknamed Lob City for this play, with Chris Paul throwing and DeAndre Jordan catching. Chandler did the same for the 2011 champion Dallas Mavericks. Neither center had a post move worth guarding. Both forced defenses to keep a man near the rim at all times, which opened the floor for everyone else.
The short roll
When the defense traps the ball handler, the roll gets shorter. The center stops around the foul line, takes the pass and has to make a decision with the ball in the middle of the floor and a numbers advantage in front of him. A center who can make that pass, to the corner or to a cutter along the baseline, defeats the trap. One who cannot is the reason the trap was sent.
Post scoring: the hook shot, the drop step and why it shrank without disappearing
The most reliable shot in NBA history belonged to a center and was taken with his back half-turned to the basket. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's skyhook was released at the top of a 7-foot-2 man's reach, with his body between the defender and the ball, on a high arc that came down from above the square. Nobody blocked it with any regularity in twenty seasons. He retired in 1989 with 38,387 points, a record that stood until 2023.
Post scoring begins with position. The center establishes himself on the low block, takes an entry pass and reads which shoulder the defender is leaning on.
- The hook. A one-handed shot swept over the head, away from the defender. Mikan drilled it with both hands, and the layup exercise named for him is still run in gyms across the country.
- The drop step. The center feels the defender on his high side, steps toward the baseline with the near foot, seals the man on his back and goes to the rim. Shaquille O'Neal's version, at better than 300 pounds, usually ended in a dunk.
- The counter. Hakeem Olajuwon's "Dream Shake" was a sequence of fakes and pivots that sent defenders one way before he went the other. It rested on footwork he credited to playing soccer as a boy in Lagos.
The moves and the ways to guard them have their own page, on playing with a back to the basket.
Why coaches call fewer post-ups
Two changes reduced the post-up from the center of NBA offense to a part of it. The first was the rule change of 2001-02. Once zone principles were legal, a defense could put one man in front of the post player and another behind him before the ball was even thrown, and the entry pass became difficult. The second was arithmetic. A post-up that produces a contested two-point shot is, on average, worth less than a possession that produces an open three or a layup, and by the 2010s teams had the data to prove it.
There is also a clock inside the paint. An offensive player may not remain in the lane for more than three seconds while his team controls the ball in the frontcourt, a rule that dates to the 1930s and is explained in our guide to the offensive three-second violation. A center cannot camp at the rim and wait.
The post-up has not gone. It is still the best way to punish a smaller defender after a switch, and it still draws fouls and double teams that create open shots for others. What has gone is the offense that threw the ball inside on every trip because that was how basketball was played.
The passing center: running the offense from the elbow and the top of the key
Wilt Chamberlain led the NBA in total assists in 1967-68. He remains the only center to have done it, in a season when he took far fewer shots than in his record-setting scoring years and looked first to pass.
The idea of a center as a passer is therefore old. Bill Walton ran Portland's offense from the high post on the way to the 1977 championship, hitting cutters with passes thrown over his head. Wes Unseld, 6-foot-7 and immensely strong, started fast breaks for the Bullets with outlet passes that traveled three-quarters of the court. Arvydas Sabonis, Vlade Divac and Marc Gasol all worked from the elbow, the corner of the foul line, with guards cutting around them.
The geometry is the attraction. A center holding the ball 18 feet from the basket has pulled the other team's rim protector out with him. Behind that defender the lane is empty. Guards cut backdoor into it, and the tallest player on the floor, who can see over everyone, delivers the pass.
Handoffs and the "delay" series
The modern version runs through the dribble handoff. The center brings the ball to the top of the key or receives it there, and a shooter runs toward him. The big man can hand it off and screen in one motion, fake the handoff and drive, or hit the shooter's defender with a backdoor pass if he overplays. Coaches call the family of plays that starts this way "delay," because the offense waits on the center's read.
Nikola Jokic took the idea to its limit. The Denver Nuggets ran their whole attack through him, and in 2024-25 he averaged a triple-double for a season, the first center to do so. A team with a center like that can let its guards play off the ball and cut, and Denver won the 2023 title that way.
The limit of the approach is that it requires a rare player. Most centers who are asked to make decisions at the elbow turn the ball over or hold it too long, and the offense stalls. Coaches use the handoff game with ordinary bigs precisely because it gives them one simple read instead of five.
The stretch five: centers who shoot threes and the problem they pose
Drop coverage depends on an assumption: that the opposing center, after setting his screen, will roll toward the basket, where the dropping defender is waiting. A center who steps back to the three-point line and makes the shot breaks the assumption.
That is the stretch five. He is not a new invention. Bill Laimbeer of the Detroit Pistons shot threes as a center in the late 1980s, and Jack Sikma of Seattle and Milwaukee was skilled enough from distance that he led the entire league in free throw percentage in 1987-88. Mehmet Okur did it for Utah in the 2000s. But these were exceptions, tolerated because of the player.
The shift came in the 2010s. Brook Lopez barely attempted a three-pointer in his first eight NBA seasons and then remade himself as a volume shooter, eventually anchoring Milwaukee's 2021 championship team at both ends. Al Horford added the shot in the middle of his career. Karl-Anthony Towns won the Three-Point Contest at the 2022 All-Star weekend, a center beating guards at their own event.
What it does to a traditional big man
The problem for the defense is one of location. A rim protector guarding a stretch five has two choices, and both are bad.
He can stay near the basket, where he is useful, and concede open threes to a man who makes them. Or he can follow the shooter out to 25 feet, where he is contesting a jump shot and the lane behind him is unguarded. An offense with five shooters on the floor, known as five-out, removes the rim protector from the rim without ever beating him.
The traditional center has an answer at the other end. A stretch five is often lighter and less comfortable defending the post or holding off a strong rebounder, and a big man who cannot be guarded on the block can make the trade unprofitable. Whether the shooter or the bruiser wins depends on the players, and coaches spend much of a playoff series finding out.
Size and build: height, wingspan, standing reach and why seven-footers remain rare
The rim is 10 feet high. Everything about a center's body is measured against that number.
Height is the figure fans quote, but scouts care more about two others. Wingspan is the distance from fingertip to fingertip with the arms spread. Standing reach is how high a player can touch with his feet flat on the floor. A center with a standing reach above nine feet needs to jump only a few inches to touch the rim, which means he can contest a shot, land and contest another before a shorter player has gathered himself. When Rudy Gobert was measured before the 2013 draft, his standing reach was 9 feet 7 inches and his wingspan more than 7 feet 8.
| Player | Listed height | NBA career |
|---|---|---|
| George Mikan | 6 ft 10 in | 1948 to 1956 |
| Bill Russell | 6 ft 10 in | 1956 to 1969 |
| Wilt Chamberlain | 7 ft 1 in | 1959 to 1973 |
| Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | 7 ft 2 in | 1969 to 1989 |
| Hakeem Olajuwon | 7 ft 0 in | 1984 to 2002 |
| Shaquille O'Neal | 7 ft 1 in | 1992 to 2011 |
| Nikola Jokic | 6 ft 11 in | 2015 onward |
Three of the seven most important centers in history were listed under seven feet, and Russell was closer to 6-foot-9 by some accounts. The traditional range for the position runs from about 6-foot-10 to 7-foot-2. The tallest players the NBA has seen, Gheorghe Muresan and Manute Bol, were both listed at 7-foot-7.
Why there are so few
Very few people grow to seven feet, and of those only some have the coordination, health and interest to play professional basketball. The supply is small in every generation and cannot be coached into existence. That scarcity is why teams have always drafted size early and waited for skill to follow, sometimes for years, and why a center of ordinary talent has often had a longer career than a guard of the same ability.
Size has costs. The largest players carry enormous loads through their feet and knees, and the careers of several great centers, Bill Walton's among them, were shortened by foot injuries. Very tall players also tend to struggle at the free throw line, a weakness opponents have exploited by fouling them on purpose away from the ball. The NBA tightened its rules on that tactic in 2016, extending to the last two minutes of every quarter the penalty that had applied only at the end of games.
Weight has come down. O'Neal played at 325 pounds or more. The modern center, asked to defend in space, is typically built leaner, and strength is judged by whether he can hold position, not by the scale.
Center versus power forward, and why many teams now simply say "bigs"
The traditional distinction was simple. The center was the taller of the two interior players and stayed nearest the basket. The power forward was a little shorter, a little more mobile, and worked the area just outside him.
On defense that still holds. The 5 guards the rim, drops against the pick and roll and takes the opposing center. The 4 helps from the weak side, switches more freely and steps out to shooters. On offense the 5 is the roller and the 4 is more often the one spacing to the arc. Our page on the power forward's move from the post to the perimeter follows that side of the pairing.
The labels began to fail when lineups shrank. A team that plays one true big man and four perimeter players has no power forward in the old sense, and a team that plays a 6-foot-7 forward at center has no center. Coaches adapted their language. Many now speak of guards, wings and bigs, three categories in place of five, and a "big" is whichever one or two players are handling the screening and rim protection.
Front offices talk the same way. A scouting report is more likely to say that a prospect can guard the rim, switch onto guards or shoot from the arc than to assign him a number, because those abilities decide which lineups he can play in and the label does not.
The league's own paperwork has followed. The All-Star ballot stopped listing centers separately beginning with the 2013 game, asking voters for "frontcourt" players in their place. All-NBA voting dropped positions altogether starting with the 2023-24 season, so a ballot may now name several centers or none.
None of this means the job has gone. Somebody still has to stand at the rim. The claim that the center is obsolete was fashionable around 2015 and 2016, when small lineups were winning championships, and it has not aged well: four of the five MVP awards from 2021 through 2025 went to a center. What changed is that the label now attaches to the job being done on a given possession and no longer to a height on a roster sheet.
The rules written because of centers: goaltending, basket interference and the wider lane
No other position has this section. Basketball's lawmakers have repeatedly found that one very tall man had broken the game and changed the rules to repair it.
| Year | Rule change | The player behind it |
|---|---|---|
| 1944 | College basketball bans defensive goaltending | Bob Kurland and George Mikan |
| 1951 | NBA lane widened from 6 feet to 12 | George Mikan |
| 1964 | NBA lane widened from 12 feet to 16 | Wilt Chamberlain |
| 1967 | NCAA bans the dunk, a ban lifted in 1976 | Lew Alcindor |
| 2016 | NBA extends penalties for intentional fouls away from the ball | Poor free throw shooting centers generally |
Goaltending and basket interference
Before 1944 a defender could legally knock away a shot that was on its way down into the basket. For most of the sport's first half-century nobody was tall enough for it to matter. Then Kurland, a 7-footer at Oklahoma A&M, and Mikan, at DePaul, began standing in front of the rim and swatting away shots that would have scored. The colleges outlawed it, and the rule was in the NBA's book from the league's first season.
The offensive side followed. A tall player could guide a teammate's shot into the basket, or tip it in while it was still on the rim, and the rules were extended so that neither team may touch the ball while it is on the ring or within the imaginary cylinder above it. That is basket interference, and the NBA enforces it more strictly than international basketball does. Both violations are set out in our explainer on goaltending and what counts as interference.
The lane
The original lane was six feet wide, which with the circle at the top gave the painted area the outline that is still called the key. Mikan set up at its edge, three feet from the basket, and scored at will. The NBA doubled it for 1951-52. Because an offensive player may spend only three seconds in the lane, a wider lane meant Mikan had to start farther out or keep moving.
Thirteen years later the league did it again for Chamberlain, adding four more feet. The college game widened its own lane to 12 feet in the mid-1950s, a change widely attributed to Russell's dominance at San Francisco, and has kept that width since.
The NCAA's dunk ban, in force from 1967 to 1976, was aimed at UCLA's Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Its most lasting effect was to make him perfect the hook shot.
The players who defined the position, from Mikan to Jokic
Seven centers, each of whom left the job different from how he found it.
| Player | NBA seasons | Championships | What he changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| George Mikan | 1948-1956 | 5 | Proved a big man could be a team's whole offense |
| Bill Russell | 1956-1969 | 11 | Made defense and rebounding the route to titles |
| Wilt Chamberlain | 1959-1973 | 2 | Set scoring and rebounding records that still stand |
| Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | 1969-1989 | 6 | The skyhook and two decades of excellence |
| Hakeem Olajuwon | 1984-2002 | 2 | Guard footwork in a 7-foot body |
| Shaquille O'Neal | 1992-2011 | 4 | Physical force no single defender could handle |
| Nikola Jokic | 2015 onward | 1 | The center as his team's best passer |
Championship counts are through the 2024-25 season, and Mikan's five include the 1949 title won in the BAA, the league that became the NBA.
Mikan was the first star the professional game had. He wore thick glasses and the number 99, and his Minneapolis Lakers won five titles in six seasons. Russell arrived in Boston in 1956 and won 11 championships in 13 years, the last two as player-coach. He never led the league in scoring and was voted its Most Valuable Player five times, which says what his peers thought mattered.
Chamberlain is the statistical outlier in all of American sport. He averaged 50.4 points for the 1961-62 season, and on March 2 of that year scored 100 in a game against the Knicks in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a night described in our account of the 100-point game and what the box score shows.
Abdul-Jabbar won six MVP awards, more than any other player through 2024-25, across twenty seasons with Milwaukee and the Lakers. Olajuwon, the first pick of the 1984 draft, had the most complete single season a center has produced in 1993-94: Most Valuable Player, Defensive Player of the Year and Finals MVP, all in the same year. O'Neal won three straight Finals MVP awards with the Lakers from 2000 to 2002 and was so strong that opponents chose to foul him deliberately sooner than let him catch the ball near the rim.
Jokic was drafted 41st in 2014, and through the 2024-25 season had won three MVP awards and a championship with Denver. He does not jump especially well and is no shot blocker. He sees the floor better than the guards around him, and he has shown that a center can be the hub of an offense from 20 feet away as surely as Mikan was from three.
The rulebook kept moving the big man away from the basket. The best of them kept finding something to do from wherever they were put. More on the game's rules and history is gathered on our basketball hub.