There is no Center

The NBA has deleted the center position from the All-Star Game nomination ballot. There is no center in the All-Star Galaxy! This is seen by many an NBA junkie, myself included, as the first step toward the eventual extinction of traditional, fixed position delineations in the league. And sure, the NBA nerds out there are all but unanimously condoning the centerless ASG ballot, but the hero Bethlehem Shoals foresaw, and proclaimed, the end of static positions (assigned to particular players according to their main role on a team) way back. Most recently, he wrote about it, brilliantly, for The Classical. Witness his prescient utopian-anarchist vision!:

I used to be a positional relativist, with players’ roles determined by a set of responsibilities that had to be distributed across the roster. However, this now seems way too rigid, as it locates the possibility of unflinching order somewhere between a team’s identity and the identity of the individual players—neither of which was supposed to slip or crumble. Now I would say I’m more of a positional anarchist, but not in the violent, liberal-arts-kids gone wild, sense. I’m thinking more of the utopian version of anarchism, where everyone is provided precisely through the rejection of overarching order or authority.

There’s a lot more to this than theory. In practice, it’s already been happening, all over the league, for a long time. The NBA isn’t the game changer; the game is changing the NBA.