They’re the toughest position to fill in basketball - centers.  And I’ve got a couple of thoughts about them.  With that in mind, I’m gonna steal an old column title from DM and chat a little bit about the trends that we’ve seen this year from our big men.

Trend #1 - The Breakout is “In.”

Breakouts have come in all forms this year from fantasy centers.  There’s been the out-of-nowhere breakout, good-to-great breakout, even the answering-your-questions breakout.  For example:

Player                        APR Last Year   APR This Year
Amare Stoudamire         n/a                   16
Carlos Boozer                53                    29
Emeka Okafor                96                    39
Dwight Howard              71                    43
Andris Biedrins              n/a                    59
Al Jefferson                   n/a                    64
Tyson Chandler             144                   73

Biedrins was a legitimate out-of-nowhere guy.  He didn’t even land on our fantasy tiers list, where guys like Ike Diogu and Kurt Thomas did.  He looks like a legit mid-round center for years to come, as does Al Jefferson, another breakout guy who was slightly more predictable.  Others, like Okafor and Stoudamire, had to come back from injuries but did better than anyone expected.  Finally, guys like Boozer and Howard made “The Leap” this year, and both are probably top-30 picks for the forseeable future.  I was pretty surprised to see such a strong list of bigs who really came out this year and showed us what they could do - in a good way.

Trend #2 - So Steady

Other guys had question marks related to their performance this year.  A few of them have really come through for their owners and justified being taken high in the draft:

Player              APR Last Year          APR This Year
Mehmet Okur         49                            58
Yao Ming               12                             9
Tim Duncan            38                           23

For Okur and, to a lesser degree, Ming, the question was if their 2005-2006 seasons were for real.  Ming had a slight breakout last year, really emerging as a big-time contributor in FT% and making a big leap in points and boards.  This year - and I realize he missed time with an injury but it was unrelated to last year and he seems to be fine for next year - he’s played even better.  He’s getting to the line more than ever before and shooting even better than last year, scoring even more and blocking shots at a career-high rate as well.  For Okur, He was a major breakout guy last year, and the assumption was that with Boozer back in the lineup full-time he’d take a step back - but nother has been further from the truth.  He’s improved even more from three-point range, and really backed up his solid 05-06 campaign with another quality year.

Duncan, well, you just can’t count this guy out.  People (us included) were really down on him going into the year, and thought he might be losing some of his luster, but I guess not.  Sorry, Timmy.  On another note, Jermaine O’Neal and Samueal Dalembert can probably go in here as well.

Trend #3 - Old is Bad

Lets just get to it:

Player                     APR Last Year      APR This Year
Brad Miller                    30                     132
Zydrunas Ilgauskas      46                     104
Ben Wallace                  59                      97
Shaquille O’Neal            94                     n/a

Oh, boy.  this is just not pretty.  I’ll leave this one to the peanut gallery - where the hell do you draft these guys next year?

The point is, add the top two groups to the this of consistently good centers like Chris Bosh, Pau Gasol, and Jermaine O’Neal, and breakout-next-year-potentials like Andrew Bynum and Greg Oden, and decent-but-but-that-great guys like Al Harrington, Andrew Bogut and Nenad Krstic, and I think it’s possible that we’ll have 20 good centers next year, which is going to make the center scarcity issues an interesting question heading into the summer.