An offence needs one player who can score from nothing

Beautiful ball movement produces good shots until the night it does not, and then somebody has to improvise.

Systems are lovely right up to the moment a good defence takes the first two options away, and then a team either has an answer or it stands around passing the ball along the perimeter waiting for something to happen.

This is the part of the analytics era I think has been oversold. The evidence that ball movement generates better shots than isolation is strong, and any coach ignoring it is being stubborn. But the evidence describes averages across thousands of possessions in ordinary conditions, and playoff basketball is not ordinary conditions. Preparation improves. Defences take away the first action specifically. Officiating tightens and the drives that drew fouls in February do not draw them in May.

Under those conditions the value of a player who can generate a shot without help rises sharply, and the value is not really in the shot itself. It is in what the defence must do about the threat. Guarding somebody who can score from a standstill costs a defender's full attention, and a defender giving full attention is a defender not helping anywhere else, which quietly improves everyone else's night.

Interior scoring is one of the cleaner versions of this, because it does not depend on a shot going in from twenty five feet. A player who can catch on the block against a single defender and produce something reasonable gives a team a possession it can call at any point, against any coverage, without needing a screen to be set well or a pass to arrive on time. That is a fallback, and fallbacks are worth more than their average efficiency because you use them at the exact moments when everything else is failing.

I would go further. I think teams should keep a small amount of this in the offence all season even when the numbers say not to, purely so it is not cold when it is needed. Skills you have not run since October do not appear in a conference final.

The objection is that reps spent there are reps not spent on the actions you will run most. Fair. It is a genuine trade.

I would still pay it, because I have watched too many efficient offences go quiet for six minutes and lose a series in them.