The post-up is a passing play now

Teams do not feed the block to score from it; they feed it to make five defenders move at once.

Watch where the eyes go. A big man catches on the left block, plants, and before he has even squared up, the weak-side corner defender has taken two steps in. That is the whole point. The shot he takes afterwards is almost an afterthought, and coaches who still judge the entry pass by whether it produced a hook shot are grading the wrong thing.

I think the post-up survived the analytics purge for a reason nobody wanted to say out loud. It is not efficient as a scoring action. It never was. Two points from twelve feet, against a set defence, with a foul maybe one time in six, is a bad trade against a corner three. But the pass out of it is not a bad trade at all, because the defence that collapses to stop the hook has just given up its shape.

The mechanism is simple and it is about time, not geometry. A drive into the paint forces a decision in half a second. A post-up forces the same decision but holds it there for three or four seconds while the offence rearranges itself around the pressure. Cutters can time their movement. Shooters can relocate. The help defender has to commit before he knows where the ball is going, and once he commits he is late to everything.

So the number I want is not points per post-up. I want points per possession that contained a post-up, counting the kick-out three and the cut that came off it. Those look like different plays in the log. They are the same play.

There is a cost, and teams underrate it. A post entry is slow. It burns clock that a fast offence would rather spend on a second and third action, and against a defence that simply refuses to double, you have spent five seconds to arrive at the shot you were trying to avoid. That is why post-ups cluster late in the shot clock and against specific matchups, not as a base offence.

The players who make this work are not the biggest ones. They are the ones who can read a second defender's hips and throw across their own body without turning. That skill is rare, it is not measured anywhere, and it is worth more than another inch of height.