Will Okafor find his place in today’s new game?

When the NBA draft unfolds on Thursday night in Brooklyn, it’ll be stacked with human-interest storylines.

The projected top picks include Emmanuel Mudiay, a Congolese-born Texan who attended a prep school founded by Deion Sanders before he blew off a one-and-done college career for a year in the Chinese league. There’s also Trey Lyles, who was born in Saskatoon and bloomed at the University of Kentucky — the first Canadian with lottery-pick potential who hasn’t garnered much of a fuss, precisely because Canada has grown accustomed to producing such talent. And then there’s the 20th pick, or whatever the Raptors turn it into.

But the most interesting man in the draft, in a lot of ways, is Jahlil Okafor. On one hand he looks destined for NBA stardom. He’s got a U.S. national championship from Duke. He looks to be a consensus top-three pick, and very likely the No. 2 selection of the L.A. Lakers.

And yet he is also something that’s rare for a one-and-done 19-year-old: He’s being called a throwback. A traditional back-to-the-basket low-post operator. Okafor is six-foot-11 and a strong 270 pounds, with a massive seven-foot-five wingspan. But his foot speed and leaping ability aren’t stellar. His free-throw shooting (51 per cent) suggests his shooting touch isn’t worthy of respect. His underwhelming shot-blocking numbers at Duke (1.4 a game) indicate he won’t fall into another cherished category of NBA big man — i.e. the rim protector.

The website FiveThirtyEight.com recently calculated, using statistical projections, that Okafor has a 5.9 per cent chance of being a star and a 29.6 per cent chance of being a bust in years two through five of his NBA career.

So given that we just watched an NBA championship series in which the winners, the Golden State Warriors, parked their all-star, low-post centre Andrew Bogut on the bench, it’s worth asking: Is Okafor, or any player whose skill set resides in the offensive low post, worth the investment?

As Wayne Embry, the former low-post presence and Raptors senior advisor, was saying recently of Okafor: “He’s got tremendous footwork in the post. I just hope someone uses it.”

Whether someone will is an open question. Certainly the Raptors are well-acquainted with the pros and cons of a low-post presence. Toronto used the fifth overall pick in the 2011 draft on Jonas Valanciunas, the Lithuanian seven-footer. And for all his potential, he has still often been a spectator at key moments of games. The problem, with Valanciunas as with Okafor, is largely defensive. As Raptors coach Dwane Casey has pointed out more than once, the trend in the league is for teams to use smaller lineups in the closing minutes of games. That puts huge stress on a certain kind of big man.

“At the end of games, everybody’s going small, and you’ve got to have the ability to match that,” Casey said. “That’s where I got in trouble with JV. Putting him out there trying to guard the smaller centres was tough. I think there’s going to come a time when he’s going to be able to do that.”

Maybe there will come a time when he’s able. Then again, maybe there won’t. The Warriors had remarkable success with a small lineup. Facing the Cavaliers in the NBA final, the Warriors often found six-foot-six swingman Andre Iguodala just guarded by Cleveland’s lumbering seven-footer Timofey Mozgov. The smaller man not only won the matchup, he parlayed it into the MVP of the NBA finals.

“The bigs are becoming an endangered species,” Embry said. “No one teaches post play anymore. You see kids work to develop. And because you can’t shoot threes, you’re not in the game.”

That’s not to say big men aren’t valuable. Anthony Davis, the sixfoot-10 front-liner for the New Orleans Pelicans, has emerged as one of the dominant players in the league — “the best player not named LeBron James,” according to incoming head coach Alvin Gentry. But Davis is succeeding, not with an old-school post game, but with a rare combination of size and length and athleticism.

That set of weapons works well in an era in which strategy is dominated by pick-and-roll action, wherein the big man’s role on the offensive end, if he has one, is often to set a screen and pop out for a possible jump shot; on the defensive end, a mobile disruptor of passing lanes and shot attempts is invaluable.

Those factors, and the analytical-based push to prioritize the efficiency of the three-pointer, has gone a long way toward moving teams away from offences rooted in the low block.

Phil Jackson, the legendary coach of 11 championship teams who is now president of the New York Knicks, has derided the prevailing playing style as hard to watch. Embry sees it as unbalanced.

“In my opinion, you can still shoot as many threes. And if you develop your post player right, he can pass out of double teams. If he’s effective, he’s going to draw double teams. So you’ve still got opportunities,” Embry said. “The pick and roll has always been a part of the game. But so has post play. We’re getting further and further away from that.”

What that means for the likes of Okafor and Bogut and Valanciunas is anyone’s guess.

“If I’m talking to another big, I say, ‘You know, I don’t think I could play in the league today,’ ” said Embry, who averaged 20 points and 13 rebounds a game in one of his five all-star seasons, 1961-62. “It’s too bad to see it happening. Hopefully it’s just a cycle and it’ll revert back to a place where the post player has more value.”