A post entry buys three seconds of scrambled defence

The value of throwing the ball inside is measured in how late the closeouts arrive afterwards.

Time the rotations, not the shot. Once you start doing that, the argument about interior play changes shape entirely.

A defence at rest is a settled thing. Five players, each with an assignment, each within reach of their man, everybody facing the right way. Nothing an offence does from the perimeter disturbs that much unless somebody beats their defender off the dribble, and beating a set defender off the dribble in a half court is hard, which is why so many possessions end in a contested jumper that the shot chart insists was a good idea.

Throw it into the post and the settled thing stops being settled. The defence must decide, immediately, whether to trust the one on one. If it does, fine, and you have a low value shot. If it does not, the second defender leaves somebody, and from that instant the defence is a player short and reacting rather than positioned. Everything after that is a chain of late arrivals. The closeout comes a beat behind, the corner help comes across a beat behind that, and the shot that eventually goes up is open in a way that no perimeter action produced.

The window is short. Roughly two to four seconds, in my counting, before the defence has recovered its shape, and an offence that swings the ball twice inside that window generates a genuinely open look while an offence that swings it once generates a rushed one. Which is why the pass out of the post is a more important skill than the shot in it, and why teaching a big to score over both shoulders while never teaching them to read the second defender is backwards.

The honest objection is that many defences no longer send help. They have decided the one on one is a better bet than the scramble, and against a mediocre post player they are right. That is a defensible read, and if a team refuses to double you have to score, or the possession really is what the critics say it is.

So the whole thing rests on being good enough inside to force a decision. Not good enough to dominate. Just good enough that leaving one defender feels risky, which is a much lower bar than the analytics conversation assumes.