In a game fundamentally built on height, it seems the tallest player is being phased out. So where have all the centers gone?

BASKETBALL HAS ALWAYS been a game played from the inside out—from the hoop outwards. A regulation NBA court is 94 feet long and 50 feet wide, but it is within the narrow painted lane, known as the key, where games are won or lost. It is the space where centers traditionally dominate, as scorers on one end of the court and protectors on the other.

"An effective center should have the ability to deny the opposition any easy points in the paint," Abdul-Jabbar—a six-time champion and most valuable player, the league's all-time leading scorer, and arguably the best to ever play the position—said in an email interview. "Offensively a great center will have an arsenal of shots that make him impossible for one man to guard."

For years, that was the formula for success. More than just putting up points, a traditional center employs the low-post technique—a physically demanding, back-to-the-basket set of offensive and defensive fundamentals. The low post—an imaginary region on both sides of the key—is one of the most important areas of the court, and one that a team's center must control. Basically, he acts as his team's last line of defense, while also performing many of the unpleasant work that few of today's superstars are willing to do. It entails highly desired, lowly recognized duties, everything from setting screens and posting up on offense, to jamming up the painted lane around the hoop and turning away shots in the defensive zone.

Centers became so dominant, in fact, that the NBA twice changed the rules of the game in an attempt to level the playing field between those teams that possessed one and those that did not. Hoping to offset the supremacy of the Minneapolis Lakers George Mikan, the league doubled the width of the key—from six to 12 feet—in 1951, and then increased it again to 16 feet in 1964 to counteract then-San Francisco Warriors big man Wilt Chamberlain. By widening the space, pushing players a further distance from the basket and lowering their shooting percentage, the NBA tried to make it more difficult for these men in the middle to do either so effortlessly.

Other rule changes, in particular those that sped up the game, also worked against centers. The first came in 1955 with the inception of the 24-second shot clock. With it, players were forced to run up and down the court more often, which took a physical toll on the game's biggest bodies.

More rules devaluing the big man were around the corner, and the role of the center has been changing ever since. When the NBA introduced the 3-point shot in 1979, teams began to put an emphasis on developing the perimeter shooter, who tended to be a shorter, more agile player.