Along with the fusillade of platitudes that come with every annual NBA Media Day, the beginning of training camp season comes with just as many fans and media members pointing out the hollowness of these optimistic day-one words. Many a mild cynic is quick to point out that everyone says they’ve gained muscle while losing weight, worked on their jump shot, and really bonded with their teammates over the summer. In actuality, the eggheads say, their stock is unlikely to have improved much—these bountiful narratives of improvement and boundless ambition are tired, they insist, and as such they should be ignored.
In the case of Phoenix Suns center Deandre Ayton last week, he saved commentators from having to issue such corrections. In an unusual, perhaps historical display of glum, oppressed media day energy, the recently re-signed big man told reporters that he hadn’t talked to head coach Monty Williams all summer, after a disastrous end to the team’s playoff run in the spring. He also spoke of having an “organization across [his] chest,” after attempting to flee for the Indiana Pacers in restricted free agency, but instead being forced back to Arizona.
There is a lot weighing on the mostly young Suns roster, most prominently the announced sale of the team after an investigation of owner Robert Sarver turned up volumes of unsavory evidence. But for Ayton, specifically, there is the unwanted circumstance of being a thankless big man, given finite room to flourish. He is expected to screen and roll for Chris Paul or Devin Booker on nearly every possession he shares the floor with them, with his opportunities to touch the ball limited to their discretion. And when he does see it, he is asked to maintain extraordinary efficiency as a finisher.
Over the past two seasons, Ayton has done exactly that. But it would seem that he no longer wants to, and that the bill has come due on the good will he’s shown during his subjugation into such a blunt instrument role. He’s far from the first big man to feel this way. For recent context, let’s consider the Andre Drummond Corollary. An All-Star in 2016 and 2018, the current Chicago Bulls backup center has now been relegated to minimum-contract bit player territory for the past few seasons, before he’s even hit his 30th birthday.
Drummond hasn’t really gotten any worse at what he does best (rebounding and rim-running), but since his second All-Star appearance, he has been more eager to diversify his offensive game. After things fizzled out for him with the Detroit Pistons, near the end of the maximum contract extension he secured after his rookie deal expired—which is exactly what Ayton just did this summer—Drummond was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers, where he got to explore the full range of his abilities as a passer, ball handler,\ and less rim-oriented player. It didn’t go well for him, and though he remains excellent at many parts of his job, his career has taken on a less glorious, more mercenary nature.
At least part of this shift in Drummond’s fortunes has to do with how he’s perceived by coaches and front office executives throughout the league: somewhere after he peaked with the Pistons, he got under the umbrella where “centers who think they’re guards” live, and hasn’t seemed able to find his way out from under it. Not many seven-footers are granted the kind of lease on the court that Drummond wanted, and Ayton, who is a maximum player without getting that green light himself, believes he should be one of them. He’s been saying so pretty clearly for at least a year, and even when he came out of the draft in 2018, when he was selected first overall. He could’ve attempted to bloom in such a way in Indiana, had he been allowed to go there, just as Drummond got his chance in Cleveland.
This modern dilemma of the center may sound familiar if you’ve watched enough Inside the NBA–it’s the kind of thing Shaq is always talking about, and not in a way that Ayton, Drummond, or any other centers with more guard-like aspirations want to hear. With his distinctly back-in-my-day posturing, he paints a vision of big men needing to play as he did: at the rim only, where you trust your guards to take care of things out there, and solidify yourself as the vortex of force that your team needs. Even in the case of demonstrably excellent jumbo shooters and ball handlers like Joel Embiid and Karl-Anthony Towns, this is what he believes.
Ayton wouldn’t have competed for a title in Indiana, as he has and maybe still will in Phoenix, but that doesn’t seem to matter to him as much. He wants to be more like those other guys, and appears to think he’s paying too many of the Suns’ wages of victory, without experiencing enough of the creative joy or adoring local worship that the guys who get to have the ball in their hands are more familiar with. At 24, he has four seasons on his new, lush contract to find a way to prove he deserves similar responsibilities, and that he’s good enough with them to get paid just as well the next time he’s out on the market. It may or may not happen in Phoenix, where, until we are shown otherwise, they’re asking him to be something different from what’s inside of him.
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