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Sports

Justise Winslow Is The Revolution

Justise Winslow doesn't have a position, but is one of the top prospects in the NBA Draft anyway. In the past, this would've hurt him. Now, he's the future.
Photo by Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports

Justise Winslow is a lucky young man. Not just because he was blessed by the basketball gods with a versatile set of skills and a tenacious attitude that will help him make the most of them. Not just because the genetic lottery handed him a six-foot, seven-inch frame capable of supporting his tree trunk arms and what will soon to be one of the ten-best heads of hair in the NBA. That is all good, of course, but Winslow is lucky to have been born 19 years ago and to be embarking on a professional basketball career in basketball's era of enlightenment.

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Winslow is a tweener. That term, which is almost always used in a pejorative way, seems to have fallen out of the NBA vernacular. It used to refer to a player who fell between two positions due to a body that was somehow too big or too small for the skills it carried—a gunning two-guard with point guard size, say, or a low-post banger so short that his banging becomes irrelevant. Winslow, for his part, has the strength of an interior player but the height of a wing. In college, he could defend all five positions; in the NBA he may find (at least initially) that he's a touch slow, or a smidge too short. Winslow presents the same sort of mixed bag on offense, where he does a little bit of everything, but nothing at an exceptional level.

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For all the hard edges on Winslow's enormous shoulders, there are precious few in his scouting reports. A scouting video at Draftexpress lists his strengths as, "strength, offensive versatility, feel for the game, defense, intangibles." Other than perhaps strength, there is nothing in that description that paints a tangible picture of what he might actually do for a NBA team. He is good, or we wouldn't be talking about him. He is strong, smart, and plays hard. Everything else is vague. There have always been players like this. The difference is that Winslow's tweenerdom is now more of a positive than a negative.

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If Winslow was entering the draft a decade ago, the team that drafted him would look to fit him into an existing box. For most teams, there was a dogmatic understanding of which responsibilities fell to which positions and how much variation was acceptable. In that era, Winslow would have been a traditional power forward, forced to take up residence on the low block and figure out a workaround for his height. Or he would have been a wing, shuffled into some variation of the "Next Jordan" family of preconceived notions, and pressed to develop his perimeter game. A great many players failed under that model, although sometimes the model failed them as well.

"Yeah but Anthony Randolph." — Photo by Chris Steppig/NCAA Photos-Pool Photo via USA TODAY Sports

But Winslow is being drafted in 2015, and over the last decade, a positional revolution has been fought and won. Although five positions still exist, there are now near-infinite number of variations, equally valid, upon what those five might be and do. The Cavaliers made the Finals relying heavily on small lineups that deployed LeBron James as the nominal power forward, handling the ball on the perimeter and collapsing the defense with penetration to the middle of the floor. Often the beneficiary was Tristan Thompson, an actual power forward turned nominal center, who mostly crept the baseline and devoured offensive rebounds.

They were undone by the Golden State Warriors, who took this idea even further. The turning point in the series was Golden State using Andre Iguodala, a wing player, at power forward and sliding Draymond Green to center. Green himself would probably be a wing for many teams and singlehandedly embodies the new positional fluidity of today's NBA.

Green and Winslow have been linked in more than a few pre-draft articles, and the comparison makes some sense. Both players are of similar size and strength, both play intense defense, and both have the versatility to handle all sorts of cross-matches and defensive switches. Both can do a little bit of everything offensively—swing the ball, hit some open perimeter shots, attack certain matchups off the dribble or in the low post, make timely cuts, and just generally be in the right place at the right time. But the best thing about arriving in the NBA at this moment in time is that Winslow doesn't need to go into "Draymond-Green-type-wing-big-combination" positional box either. He can go his own way.

The symbiotic success of the Warriors and Green owes a lot to the organization's identification of all the things he did really well and the things he could do passably well. The Warriors figured this out for everyone else on the roster, then spent the season working out how to put those pieces together. This looks easier on the page than it is in the gym, but there's a path that teams can follow, here. The NBA has always had room for the unique and incongruous of dominant players. Now smart organizations are extending that opportunity—the freedom to play the way you play best—to every contributor.

There are certainly less enlightened teams that might try to cram Winslow into one of those antique positional boxes; the two that spring to mind rhyme with Schmicks and Schmakers. Unfortunately for Winslow, and unsurprisingly, such teams tend to be bunched up at the early part of the draft. But in this era it seems much more likely than ever that Winslow's success will be because of his uniqueness, not in spite of it. Winslow's strengths will be enhanced by a system that understands them, and the fact that he can comfortably defend all sorts of players will matter more than the few he can't. His offensive role is more likely to be dictated by what he can do than by what players in his role have traditionally done.

This is the basketball ecosystem that Winslow is entering, and it is swell.