The short roll is the post-up wearing modern clothes

A big catching the ball in the middle of a broken defence is doing exactly what post players always did.

Nobody argues about the short roll. It is accepted, taught everywhere, and considered thoroughly contemporary, which is odd given that the skills it demands are the ones the sport spent a decade telling big men to stop practising.

Here is the situation. The screen forces the defence to commit two players to the ball. The big rolls, catches somewhere around the free throw line, and now stands in the middle of a defence that is one man short, with three or four seconds to decide what to do before the rotation completes. He can shoot. He can drive. He can find the weakside shooter or the cutter coming behind the rotation.

Read that description again and it is a post touch. Ball in the hands of a large man, inside the arc, defence in a state of collapse, everything depending on his ability to see the floor and make a decision under contact. The only real differences are that the catch happens facing the basket and it was manufactured by a screen rather than by an entry pass and a seal.

Which tells you what the actual objection to post play was, and it was never that big men should not have the ball. It was about where the possession started and how long it took to get there. A post entry costs several seconds of clock and requires a player capable of establishing position against resistance. A short roll arrives free, as a byproduct of an action the team was running anyway.

That is a real efficiency argument and I accept it. What I do not accept is the conclusion teams drew, which was to stop developing interior footwork, touch and passing under pressure, because those are exactly the skills the short roll requires. Plenty of bigs now arrive in the middle of a broken defence with the ball and no idea what to do with it, and the possession dies there.

Teach the old skills. Use them in the new location.

The pass out of a short roll and the pass out of a double team are the same pass. Only the paperwork changed.