Post ups are dead. We are living in the Pace and Space Era. When the Golden State Warriors won the title in 2015, they set a new precedent. Since then, the league has changed in an effort to keep up with their revolutionary playstyle. Five-out lineups and copious threes have become the NBA’s new meta. It’s a copycat league.
Now the days of an offense centering its gameplan around a dominant post scorer are gone. The back to-the-basket game in the post is a dying artform. Everyone wants to play like a guard.
This is the popular narrative. Zooming out from the typical magnified lens of basketball discourse, from player-focused comparison and analysis, from endless debates over Top 10s and Top 30s, this is the main focus of “big picture” discussions. The general trend people immediately notice in the game. Teams take a lot more threes now, and they post up way less than they used to.
Offenses operate in space now; three-pointers have acted like decongestants. There are no longer power forwards spotting up for catch and shoot jumpers from 18 feet. Shouts out to David West, Carlos Boozer, and the best to ever do it, Tim Duncan.
It’s a perimeter-focused game now. No one dominates in the post anymore. There’s no Shaq (there was never going to be another Shaq), there isn’t even a DeMarcus Cousins or an Al Jefferson. No one throws the ball down low and lets the big fellas go to work anymore. They have them spot up outside the arc. Look at Brook Lopez. He averaged 0.0 3PA over his first five years in the league. Now he takes more threes than twos!
Bigs don’t work on this facet of the game anymore. Guards and wings don’t even know how to throw proper entry passes these days. Teams just want to take as many threes as possible because basketball has become a math equation. What happened to the game I love? (Mark Jackson voice). It’s impossible to watch the NBA in 2024 and avoid hearing this rhetoric.
At a glance, this narrative is true. There has been a three-point revolution. The number of post ups is down across the league compared to the past. But like most popular narratives, it’s oversimplified. It’s even misleading.
A decline in frequency does not imply a decline in efficacy. Sure, there aren’t as many low post touches where a big takes up to five seconds to make his move. There aren’t centers backing down defenders until they’re on their asses with the baseline photographers. But that doesn’t mean today’s bigs aren’t as effective in the post as their elders. Post ups aren’t worse today just because they look different.
The NBA’s public playtype tracking database goes back to the 2015-16 season. So in order to compare the past to the present, let’s look at the top team in post up possessions from each end of the database. Here is the top team from this season versus the top team from the 2015-16 season:
| Team | POSS | FREQ% |
| 15-16 New York Knicks | 15.1 | 14.3% |
| 23-24 Denver Nuggets | 8.5 | 7.8% |
For a more complete picture of the leaguewide decline in post up frequency, here is the average number of post up possessions (per team) in each season:
| Season | AVG. POSS |
| 2015-16 | 8.1 |
| 2023-24 | 4.7 |
Fans’ eyes, talking heads’ eyes, jaded retired players’ eyes aren’t deceiving them. The average number of post ups in a game has nearly halved over the course of nine seasons. And it’s fair to assume if there was playtype data from 20 seasons ago, the difference between the past and the present would only look more extreme. But frequency doesn’t tell the whole story.
They may not be as popular, but post ups in 2024 are far more effective than they were in 2015. In fact, the gap between them is startling. It’s more like a chasm. Here is the top team in post up points per possession from each season:
| Team | Post Up PPP | Post Up FG% |
| 15-16 OKC Thunder | 1.00 | 51.3% |
| 23-24 Boston Celtics | 1.17 | 58.4% |
And again, these numbers are not cherry picked. The boost in efficacy is leaguewide. Here is the average post up PPP from each season:
| Season | AVG. Post Up PPP |
| 2015-16 | 0.85 |
| 2023-24 | 0.99 |
The average from 2015-16 is the lowest number in this season’s range. The average team nine seasons ago would be the worst post up team in today’s NBA. The best post up team from 2015-16 would be just 0.01 points per possession above average today. The offensive explosion isn’t just occurring beyond the arc.
Perhaps all this space everyone talks about is producing more than an increase in three-point volume and open driving lanes. Perhaps it’s actually boosting the efficiency of the post up. In fact, there seems to be strong evidence it is.
Will teams notice this jump in efficiency and start adding more post ups to their offensive gameplans? It’s certainly possible. Maybe some of them already have.
Take the Boston Celtics as an example. In the 2023 offseason, after a deep but disappointing playoff run, ending in a deflated Game Seven performance against the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals, Boston’s young head coach, Joe Mazzulla, hinted at a forthcoming shift in the team’s offensive gameplan.
Particularly after the Celtics traded for Kristaps Porzingis, Mazzulla emphasized the different matchups his team would be able to exploit, and the need for a “curveball” in their attack. He wanted to add variety to the team’s diet of high pick and rolls, drive-and-kick possessions, and isolations.
Well, he accomplished his goal, and his team is reaping the rewards. They’ve nearly tripled their post up frequency from last year—and they’ve more than tripled their scoring output in the post.
| Season | FREQ% | PTS |
| 22-23 | 2.8% | 3.1 |
| 23-24 | 7.4% | 9.6 |
Last season, the Celtics were in the bottom 10 in post up points per game. Now they score more points in the post than any team in the NBA.
In an interview with JJ Redick on Redick’s The Old Man and the Three podcast in October, a few weeks before the start of this season, here was what Mazzulla had to say about his approach to coaching the Celtics:
This season, the Celtics have the best offense in the NBA (and they’re still top five in defense). They have an Adjusted Offensive Rating of 121.4, a full 2.4 points higher than last season’s record-breaking Sacramento Kings offense. Filtering out garbage time, Boston’s Offensive Rating is 122.3—even higher and still at the top of the league (per Cleaning the Glass).
They have five shooters on the floor for nearly all 48 minutes each game. Their offense plays with the space of a football field compared to offenses from a decade ago. Unlike their antiquated predecessors, the Celtics don’t run post ups in a phone booth.
When a player catches it in the post, he has four shooters spread around him; a double team inevitably surrenders a wide open catch-and-shoot three. With their positional size across the board, they can freely exploit switches, attacking smaller defenders in the post. This is the curveball Mazzulla was talking about, and it’s a wicked one.
He recognized he had the ideal personnel to throw the pitch. Of every player with at least two post up possessions per game, the Celtics have two of the league’s three most efficient scorers.
Jayson Tatum averages 1.15 points per possession in the post, just 0.02 behind Joel Embiid. Mazzulla has empowered him to punish teams more than ever for switching smaller players onto him. Porzingis is in another galaxy. He’s Boston’s deadliest weapon—more than that, he’s the doomsday weapon architected by evil mastermind, Brad Stevens.
It’s almost unconceivable now, but Stevens acquired Porzingis and TWO FIRST-ROUND PICKS in the summer of 2023 for Marcus Smart, Mike Muscala, and a second rounder. Please excuse the tangent, but if there ever were such a thing, then that trade return must be the result of some front office dark magic. It wouldn’t be a surprise if there was blood sacrifice involved.
Porzingis is now the most efficient post scorer in the NBA by a wide margin. According to the same NBA playtype database, he’s the most effective post scorer of the past nine seasons by an astonishing 0.18 points per possession (ahead of 2022-23 Nikola Jokic).
Part of it is the fact that he’s a 7’3 beanstalk with remarkable shooting touch who has unlocked an unguardable face up midrange jumper. It doesn’t matter how tightly guarded he is, Porzingis can and will turn toward the hoop and shoot it like his defender is invisible. He hits these jumpers wearing his defenders like smocks. Nothing bothers him. Anyone who switches onto him is a plate of food.
But the other part is his offensive ecosystem, the context in which he plays. Again, for emphasis, Boston currently has the most effective offense of all time. Sure, statistics are inflated and it’s difficult to gauge a team’s true placement in league history. But no one can deny the special offensive talent of this year’s Celtics. Boston’s offense is the apotheosis of floor spacing.
Efficiency is up across the board. Offense is better now than it was 10 years ago. But post ups in 2024 are more effective than pick and rolls, isolations, and handoffs, and they aren’t even far behind spot ups. Again, the benchmark for post up effectiveness this season is 1.17 PPP. For spot ups, it’s also 1.17 PPP. And both benchmarks are set by the same team.
Last season, playing for the Wizards, Porzingis quietly had a career year in the post, averaging 1.18 points per possession. He developed his unstoppable face up jumper playing in obscurity in Washington D.C., within a mediocre offense. He was near the top of the league in post up effectiveness, right alongside Joel Embiid and just behind Jokic.
Take the same post scorer and surround him with knockdown shooters, and this is what happens. Here are this season’s leaders in post scoring, along with their respective points per possession:
| Player | Post Up Points | Post Up PPP |
| Joel Embiid | 7.1 | 1.17 |
| Nikola Jokic | 6.7 | 1.14 |
| Anthony Davis | 4.5 | 1.11 |
| Kristaps Porzingis | 4.3 | 1.40 |
The top three most effective post scorers in the NBA’s nine-year playtype database all come from the past two seasons. They are the past two MVPs, Jokic and Embiid, and now Porzingis—who, as you can see, is currently reconstructing the meaning of “effective.” And this post dominance is most apparent at the top of the NBA hierarchy.
In layman’s terms, these dudes just happen to play for the best teams in the league. Correlation? Causation? Mere coincidence? Hard to tell exactly. But betting against the last one seems safe to say the least.
The team with the highest post up frequency in the regular season and in the playoffs won the title last year—and made it look exceptionally easy. Of course, that team also had (and has) Nikola Jokic, but the fact remains: post ups aren’t dead. And they aren’t just holding on for dear life, they’re more effective than they’ve been in years. They might be more effective than ever before. We might be witness to the emergence of a post up renaissance.
Perhaps the Celtics saw something of a blueprint in Denver’s more versatile attack. As Mazzulla foresaw, post ups have helped propel Boston’s offense to the top of the league. Now the top two teams in post up frequency and points are the favorites to win their respective conferences, and the two teams with the shortest odds to win the Finals.
It’s true. There aren’t nearly as many post up possessions as there were as recently as nine seasons ago. You won’t tune into a playoff game in May to see two giants going back and forth, pounding the rock into the floor in the low post every chance they get.
The game has evolved (for some, to the point of unrecognizability) in a short period of time. But the post up hasn’t been jettisoned in the turbulent waters of change. It has evolved along with the rest of the game. It has adapted to survive in a new climate and found that it can thrive.
