Bigs are asked to play a game their bodies never trained for

The modern centre covers ground like a wing while still absorbing the collisions of an interior player.

Twenty years ago a seven footer was asked to occupy space, defend a small area of the floor, and take contact. The contact has not gone anywhere. Everything else has been added on top.

Now the same player is expected to hedge a screen at the arc, recover to the rim, close out to the corner, and get back up the floor in transition, all while carrying a frame that was never designed for repeated changes of direction. The sport changed its demands faster than the bodies playing it could adapt, and the mismatch shows up in the injury lists. Knees and feet, mostly. Structures that tolerate load in a straight line and complain when asked to decelerate and turn.

The training response has been to make bigs more athletic, which is right as far as it goes and has produced a generation of centres who move remarkably well. What it has not done is reduce the total load. It has raised the ceiling of what these players can do, and coaches have promptly asked for all of it, so the margin between capacity and demand has stayed about where it was.

Interior scoring sits inside this. Post play is metabolically and structurally expensive in a way that shooting is not. Establishing position is a wrestling match, sealing is isometric work under load, and the finish involves contact with somebody who is actively trying to move you. Run twelve of those in a game on top of everything else and the fourth quarter version of the player is measurably slower in defensive rotation, which is a cost the offensive efficiency number never sees.

That is my actual argument, and I think it is underrated. The case against the post is usually made on offence, and the strongest case against it is on defence, in the last six minutes, when the man who has been fighting for position all night has to get out to a shooter and does not.

Which cuts both ways. Use it against a team whose centre has to defend at the level of a screen all night, and you are not just chasing two points. You are spending his legs.

Coaches understand this instinctively about guards. They rarely apply it to bigs.