Clint Capela is in the same class of centers as DeAndre Jordan, Rudy Gobert, and Tyson Chandler. All he does is soak up alley-oops like a coral sucking up polluted ocean water. The difference with Capela is that, somehow, nobody cares about him at all. He’s scoring 12 PPG (the same as DeAndre Jordan) on 63% shooting, putting him right up there among the most efficient scorers in the league, but nobody thinks about him when they’re thinking about promising, up-and-coming young centers.
Nobody pretends that he’d be doing this well if he didn’t have Harden next to him, but you know what? DeAndre Jordan got to be an All-Star because he’s got Chris Paul and, to a lesser extent, Blake Griffin setting him up nonstop. Capela has no moves to speak of and no jumpshot as far as I can tell, but the past few seasons have shown us that you don’t need those things to be considered an elite center in today’s NBA.
By some metrics you could consider Capela to be a top ten starting center in the league. That doesn’t really blow my mind very much because I’ve been making highlight videos for him since day one, but I get the feeling that the average NBA fan barely knows who he is. I don’t have the energy to run another viral hashtag campaign to fix this issue, but if somebody wants to start tweeting #careaboutcapela, I wouldn’t complain.