The Evolution of the NBA Center From Mary Pickford to Victor Wembanyama 🧵 (An abridged version of this thread appeared in the May 2026 issue of PSA Magazine.) The NBA Finals have reminded basketball fans how greatly the center position has changed during the 21st Century.  The Knicks' Karl-Anthony Towns is a seven-footer, which for decades has been considered the ideal size for the position.  But Towns is also a 40% career three-point shooter who won the Three-Point Contest at the 2022 All-Star Game.  During the playoffs this year he has hit 46% of his long-distance attempts, along with 90% of his free throws.  Towns is matched up against the Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama, who represents an unprecedented combination of height, arm span, and skill.  Over his regular–season career thus far, Wemby has taken 37% of his shots from beyond the arc.  For comparison, the most similar player in history to Wemby may be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  The three-point shot was introduced into the NBA in 1979, midway through Kareem’ career.  Over the final ten years of his regular-season career, Kareem attempted 11,707 shots.  Of these, eighteen (18) were three-point attempts, most of them probably last-second heaves (he made one).

Mary Pickford and Bill Russell were pioneers. They found themselves with an opportunity to shape an entertainment industry, and they seized that opportunity, each influencing  every successive generation of actors and ‘ballers, respectively.  Each of them took on management roles as they matured in their industry.  Pickford produced and took profit shares in many of her films, and when she became too expensive for any studio to pay, she formed the “United Artists” studio with Chaplin that survives today as a subsidiary of Amazon.  In 1966 Russell became the first black head coach in NBA history, and after a loss to Chamberlain’s 76ers in 1967, Coach Russell led the Celtics to NBA titles in 1968 and 1969 to close out his career.