How math and video games can fix NBA positions

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It’s time for the NBA to get rid of positions — or at least overhaul them. Let’s discuss why (and how).

In basketball, there are five positions: Point Guard, Shooting Guard, Small Forward, Power Forward, and Center. And it’s time for them to go.

Science, logic and enlightened ideas have been challenging outdated concepts since someone came up with the scientific method. Before we proved the atom was real 100 years ago, most people though the universe was basically made of vaguely continuous… stuff, because Aristotle said so. Before 1890, we had no idea disease was spread by these things called “germs,” thinking instead that the air was somehow just… bad.

For the entire history of the NBA, we’ve considered the aforementioned five positions as the definitive descriptors for the members of a basketball team. People have mostly accepted them without issue, but just like atoms and germs, there have been innovators ringing the alarm bells that our current designations don’t accurately reflect basketball reality for years. But the positions have evolved into complex ideologies, better called “Pointguardism” than some sort of scientific Latin term for a species like Pointus Guardiosis.

The five positions become a protected idea; a subscription to the establishment or a faith in the wisdom of tradition and the need to preserve it. Most can agree that the actual words in the positions are meaningless — small forwards are by no means small, and shooting guards don’t actually shoot any more often than point guards do — but they do connect us to the past, with every great player ever somewhere on a “The 20 Best (insert position here) in NBA History” list.

Arguments for “positionless” basketball being the future have existed since I was a kid, but plenty would argue it was all a bit overblown. The positions still feel like they mostly work, and every player in the league has managed to fit in one or two of them so far, so why fix what isn’t broken?

But they are broken, we just haven’t all accepted it. Just like a pair of old shoes that have torn soles and holes in both toes, we’ve convinced ourselves that the five positions work well enough, even though the seeds of destruction are already growing underground. The five positions — like our crappy shoes — are actually totally inadequate, do not remotely explain what the players actually do, and are in need of replacing before we trip and fall and look stupid in front of our crush.

One day, perhaps sooner than we think, they will completely fail us. So we have to be ready for a brave new world.

The NBA had traditionally enforced the five positions by crafting All-NBA and All-Defensive Teams, designations that can increase a player’s earning power by hundreds of millions of dollars. Voters were required to name two forwards, two guards, and one center… until the 2023-24 season, when the NBA said screw it and made the teams positionless.

By doing so, the NBA destroyed the final positional definition in the league that had actual, tangible meaning. Whether a player is a guard, forward or center now explicitly means nothing, which both lets the NBA ensure fairness in supermax contract availability and prevents ridiculousness like DeAndre Jordan making the 2015 All-NBA First Team.

But not everyone was a fan. That’s because today, positions exist only in the eye of the beholder. Some reject the positionless All-NBA move and love the old model and believe it has historical meaning. Some already reject the five-position model, referring to players are merely “guards” “wings” and “bigs,” conceivably allowing for more flexibility. Others have planted their flag firmly atop the traditional positional model, demanding that it still matters that teams have a traditional point guard rather than the shoot-first, ball ball-dominant guards that have come to dominate the NBA.

But beyond the quote-unquote importance of the positions is the far more complex issue with the modern designations: it has become almost impossible to place today’s stars within them.

Is Giannis Antetokounmpo really a small orward? Is he just a “big”? Is he actually just a point guard, since he routinely brings the ball over half court? Then again, Damian Lillard officially claims point guard duties, so can we really call Antetokounmpo that?

What about Luka Doncic? He’s listed at point guard, lines up during tip-off as the point guard, brings the ball over half court, routinely initiates the offense, and nobody else on the Dallas Mavericks claims to be “the point guard.” but 15 of the 100 voters on the 2022-23 NBA awards ballots — the last positional All-NBA Teams — voted for him as a forward. What?

And then there’s LeBron James, the undisputed greatest small forward of all time… or the undisputed greatest point guard of all time… or maybe both. I got in an argument on X with Jay King of The Athletic last year by trying to convince him that James was not a point guard, and by the end, I found myself wondering if he was right or if I, or anyone else, even understood what positions were anymore.

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It’s hard to say that anyone plays like LeBron or Giannis… other than LeBron or Giannis.

Just like anyone who places others in an ideological box, it usually says more about the placer than the placed. Those who believe an NBA team should “look” a certain way will contest that Doncic and James must be forwards, since they are 6’7 and 6’9 and both built like freight trains rather than the shorter, more compact distributing point guards of yesteryear.

It’s worth wondering why defining players within the five groups has become so difficult. The rise of dominant European players have showcased the totally different skill development system practiced in places like the Balkans, where Nikola Jokic and Doncic hail from. This was showcased last year by The Ringer’s Jordan Ritter Conn in a spectacular investigative podcast about “The Balkan Basketball Boom.”

Conn talked to former coaches who worked in Yugoslavia, as well as those who had seen Jokic and Doncic grow their games. The one constant? No matter your size, your skills needed to be at a high level. Guards had to rebound, and centers had to pass. Your position was based on how tall you were, but your skills would not be.

Then again, Jokic and Doncic are outliers, the absolute peak of what this school of development can produce. But their direction is where basketball is headed, and it becomes clearer each year that only a tiny number of players who are wholly deficient in even one of the six cardinal basketball skills — passing, dribbling, finishing defending, shooting, and rebounding — can be on the court at the highest level.

Check out this year’s champion, the Boston Celtics. Their “point guard” Derrick White would frequently lead the team in blocked shots, and their “center,” Kristaps Porzingis, would often take more threes than the “shooting guard,” Jrue Holiday. Oh, and their backup center, Al Horford, was a bona fide 3-point specialist. They invert everything we knew about how basketball teams played even less than two decades ago, and their play style would hospitalize shocked and confused fans if they were transported back to the 60s.

Lineups with one or two non-shooters have become untenable, and even elite scorers and passers who are too small to defend are getting iced out of the league. Because of human anatomy and genetic randomness, there will still be taller and shorter players, but the blurring of their skill sets makes traditional positions unnecessary.

The five positions may already be gone, with various societal forces still clinging to their historical legitimacy. But we’ve already seen various mad-science small-ball, big-ball, point guard-less, and point guard-overflowing lineups popping up in NBA playoff series’ throughout the last decade.

In 2016, the Golden State Warriors declared that yes, Draymond Green is a center now, which also means P.J. Tucker is a center if the Houston Rockets wanted to beat them. The Phoenix Suns started three shooting guards in the 2024 NBA playoffs and straight up didn’t have a player listed as a point guard on their roster, so I guess that makes Devin Booker a point guard now. And let’s not forget the Los Angeles Lakers basically starting four power forwards for a week in January.

In this day and age, there have to be better — or at least more accurate — words to call these guys, right? Well, I have two ideas for us. One is from one of the most sophisticated, robust, and data-driven attempts to redefine positions in the history of sports. The other is from a video game.

Option 1: The Scientific Method

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Chris Paul can be described in the same ways as other players we’ve seen before. Giannis? Not so much.

Over a decade ago, Stanford biomechanical engineering student and basketball analytics revolutionary Muthu Alagappan spoke at both the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference about his new 13 positional model for the NBA, based on topological analysis of an unfathomably large amount of NBA data.

Using dispassionate technology to return unbiased results, Alagappan’s method mapped 13 individual roles, which he then defined in words non-engineers like us could understand, which were… (inhales)

Role player, scoring rebounder, role-playing ball-handler, three-point rebounder, shooting ball-handler, offensive ball-handler, defensive ball-handler, combo ball-handler, paint protector, scoring paint protector, scoring rebounder, All-NBA First Team, All-NBA Second Team, and One-of-a-kind.

Alagappan went on to refine his results further, but what made “Muthuball” so different from the traditional five NBA positional ideologies? First off, it did away with ambiguous words like forward, center, and guard, which — let’s be honest — are just three words that have no inherent relevance to basketball. We just made them up.

“Point guard” and “shooting guard” used to be called “running guard” and “stationary guard,” but were changed conceivably to make them more flexible. Also, if you look up “power forward” on Wikipedia, it just says this:

“…the power forward is often the team’s most powerful and dependable scorer.”

Like, most powerful as in… they dunk the most powerfully? What does that even mean? Centers — because they stand in the… center (also known as “pivots,” apparently) — can usually dunk just as powerfully, and a “point guard,” Ja Morant, might be the most powerful dunker I’ve ever seen.

To make things a bit more specific, Alagappan uses a few keywords like “rebounder” which actually might help us figure out what a player actually does, rather than vague buzzwords that may have meant something at some point.

What jumps out about his new positions was the distinction between “ball-handlers” and everyone else. In Alagappan’s model, guys who could actually dribble the basketball without turning it over and were trusted to move around the court with the ball in their hands were an analytically significant group. This in turn led to the ball-handler archetype producing the largest number of variants.

And finding dudes who can actually dribble a basketball in the face of NBA-caliber defense is one of the main struggles of team building. The San Antonio Spurs spent the entirety of Victor Wembanyama’s first season without much in the way of “ball handlers,” which is probably why they went and grabbed 39-year-old Chris Paul — renowned handler of basketballs — even though the team is nowhere near contending.

Alagappan’s 13 positions are much better than the five we have right now, though they are probably more useful to teams internally than to fans and media members. And Alagappan wasn’t trying to develop a philosophical framework to supplant the NBA’s positional religiosity; he was trying to develop a tool for evaluating players that could then be used by scouts and front offices within the league.

I do want to file away Alagappan’s distinction of ball-handler versus not-a-ball-handler for later, along with his astute observation that there are three categories that need to be lifted out of the scientific framework: superstars.

You probably noticed that “All-NBA First Team,” “All-NBA Second Team” and “One-of-a-kind” aren’t exactly explaining what these guys do on a basketball court, but it helps to codify what everyone in the NBA already knows: some players are so good, they are exempt from positional boxes.

Take Antetokounmpo, someone who combines speed, power, and finesse with such an overwhelming destructive power that he can’t really be called anything other than “One-of-a-kind.” He’s not a forward, a big, or a guard.

He’s just Giannis, and everyone knows what that means.

Option 2: Video Games to the Rescue

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Games like NBA 2K may be ahead of our current positional discourse in one key way.

If you feel like you’ve heard this kind of language before, it’s because it’s similar to how the NBA 2K video game franchise defines players in their menus. Michael Jordan has a little “SG” next to his name on the historic 1998 Chicago Bulls roster, but up at the top of the screen is an icon that reads “One-of-a-kind.” When I played the games, Russell Westbrook was always something along the lines of a “slashing shot-creating star,” and James Harden was a “three-level scoring superstar”

Because it’s a video game, NBA 2K tends to get a little more flowery, with certain players being defined as a “Glass Cleaner” — a colloquial term for a great rebounder — or a “Paint Beast,” which is pretty self-explanatory. But the creativity is pretty awesome, and could be applied to the NBA itself with a few copyright agreements.

This kind of definition helps give those who play the game a quick snapshot of what they can expect to do with this player. Putting the words “Paint Beast” next to Shaquille O’Neal’s name will immediately tell a gamer who has never even heard of Shaq that they should probably go in the paint with him. When they read “three-point specialist” next to Duncan Robinson’s name when they play online with the Miami Heat, they’ll know to shoot threes with him.

Imagine an ESPN broadcast where the starting lineups are announced, and the players all have these three or four-word titles. LeBron James can be “One-of-a-kind,” but perhaps will get demoted to “pure slasher” as he ages. We can call Paul George a “three-level scoring machine” or something like that, and then get a little pettier as we trudge through the different levels; Christian Wood can be a “shoot-first backup.”

Obviously, there’s also a pretty high potential for trolling and abuse of this system. Imagine if we started calling Mattise Thybulle a “defense-first offensive liability” or had to strip Jayson Tatum of his “three-level superstar” in favor of some other adjective if his 3-point shot continues to get worse. We’d need some sort of oversight, so I’m thinking a panel of experts composed half of retired NBA or college coaches and half of NBA 2K YouTubers should do the trick. That should help the league bring in some young fans too, and plus we’d get to picture Jeff Van Gundy arguing with a Twitch streamer over what to call Giannis, so that could be fun.

When combined with Alagappan’s data about keywords to include — like “ball-handler,” “rebounder” or “One-of-a-kind,” I think we might be onto something.

Finally, there’s the nuclear option: just get rid of positions and replace them with… nothing. Just list a player’s height next to their name and just let fans figure it out. That would end the squabbling about if Doncic was a point guard or not, but it’s not nearly as fun or cool as the previous idea.

But what about NBA history? Am I — the heathen Oliver Fox — advocating for the wholesale destruction of the whole history of NBA players? The five positions may not matter now, but they certainly used to! How could I do such a horrible thing?

Fret not, imaginary concerned citizen. I think this would be an awesome thing to mark a new era in the league’s history, a bit like scientists declaring we live in the “Anthropocene” since humans have undeniably had a major impact on earth’s surface and climate. We need an inflection point to mark when the NBA became position-free, and I don’t see a better time then when All-NBA Teams became positionless. Everyone before now can keep their grandfathered-in positions, and we can even look through every player in history and give them a fun four-word title too.

In any case, it’s time to take off the blinders and do what must be done for the sake of the league. Like any revolution, it has to be done carefully, intentionally, and by those with a long-term vision so that the passions of the mob doesn’t sweep us away, and we start calling Joel Embiid a Left Fielder and Kawhi Leonard a Strong Safety.

The solution is in front of us: one part science — telling us what characteristics about players shine through analytically — and one part video game, affording us the creativity to make positions fun and infinitely expandable. So who’s with me?