While the NBA -Play -offs from 2025 are starting, we are all looking forward to seeing players like Luka Dončić, James Harden and Nikola Jokic the opportunity to stand up and remember performances to remember. They are all important players for contenders of the Western Conference, who will define this year’s play -offs this year with large versions in the coming weeks. And they are all in themselves superstars in a competition of top athletes, notes that they do not consider athletetically athletic.
In recent years, however, research has shown that each of the first players has athletic skills that distinguish them, but are more difficult to catch if you are not aware of it, and also to quantify more difficult.
Slowly but surely the word athletics gets a new meaning. The earlier, most understood definition of athletics – how fast a player can run and how high he can jump – is now too narrow, because we have learned that the tellicism that you absorb a lot of nuance and complexity than just the vertical jump and speed.
Timing, change of direction, acceleration, breakdown, coordination, reaction time and strength on the ground are only sub of the points that biomechanists and performance coaches try to measure and map in places such as the Peak Performance Project (P3). They have the Assssessed about two-thirds of the NBA players and have collected data about NBA players for more than ten years.
P3 regularly looked at Luka Dončić from the age of 16, when he just broke out on Real Madrid, until the start of his NBA career on 19. And they have stood first in trying to measure which physical qualities Mole made him so successful in the NBA.
What they found was that even if he was an exceptional Leaper or Sprinter, I had a lot of skills that clearly indicated that he had been finished, made a good NBA player, even Beofore, he entered the competition: above average strength, lateral acceleration and great postitment size. But what really struck them was the same as it noted in James Harden years earlier – Dončić’s “superhuman” brake power.
Eric Louersdorf, director of biomechanics on P3, calibrated this quality “the reverse of acceleration”, which is just as effective in basketball. In an interview with Ben Taylor on the basketball intelligence podcast a few years ago he spoke about the generation of power and said that “this is when (James) Harden and Luka (Dončić) really start to separate the selves from the peloton. When they beg down.”
Both had athletic gifts that blows under the surface, P3 thought. This brake power – or a slow step, as Luka Dončić has stranded – is abrupt and serves to create space.
Both Harden and Dončić are of course some of the best in the world back. This movement, which the two have perfect, is not about exploding past to Guy in your first step, so much about braking. With the brake they can steer to defend vast in the other direction, creating a good amount of space to get a shot up before they recover.
In the clip below, Luka Dončić shows off with his brake skills while he gets Kevin Durant on skating in one step back in the insulation that ends with a non-worked three-pointer. You can clearly see what braking is like instead of the explosion that creates the space for Dončić here:
The same can be said about the characteristic step back from James Harden:
“While James (Harden) scores in the 99th percentile in a series of December-related and also,” thought P3.
The chance of studying James Harden’s unique braking power, a skill that often escapes the eye test, helped them to understand the unique set of skills of Luka Dončić even before he was drawn up. Both players still break barriers about what athletics is and how we should think about it and try to measure it.
Leadersdorf noted that Luka’s brake skills were already standing out like a teenager, but was not an ally.
“Luka’s ability to generate strength during this phase was a subdivist
Stopping and going, abrupt braking and December go back and forth movements that Donči is a certain master of and can string to create space, to give him a unique benefit. You have clearly demonstrated that it is a kind of athletics that very well transferred to court.
This piece from a link from years ago shows that stop-and-go series of movements that Dončić can put together, almost like a rhythmic dance with the defender in seclusion:
And it is impossible to talk about NBA players who have been considered unathlike, but who nevertheless succeed in playing basketball in world class every night, without the first round of Harden, Nuggets star Nikola Jokic. The triple MVP prize winner is considered dough-like and delayed his entire career, but after testing on P3 they actually found him vray athletic-not in a way we are used to.
According to leadersdorf, one thing that stood out about Jokic “was his ability to get off the ground quickly.” Together with some Louigersdorf his “Basketball Savant skills” Called, his skills continue to distinguish him and make him extremely successful in the NBA.
The success of these players for a longer period (Dončić was drawn up in 2018, Jokic in 2014 and Harden in 2009), Lissing is considered relatively unitletic, the question of whether we have to hop again how to repeat design perspectives in the future.
Are we biased when we see that players are jumping high, too fast to conclude that this corresponds to the success of NBA and possibly miss the more complex athletics of a future Harden, Luka or Jokic?
Do teams have to evaluate players differently – perhaps by including a wider variety of athletic tests in the mowerborner, perhaps testing similar to those of P3, who caught the unique athletics of Harden and Dončić early?
Missing great talents such as Jokic, who was famous during Taco Bell Commercial as the 41st choice in the second round of the 2014 design, and which is currently generally regarded as the best player in the world, strongly suggests that we have to be red to red. Athletics means and view more closely at which other skills have the potential to switch to success at the NBA court.
Because we are about to see the next generation of NBA design -front views that will be evaluated in the coming months, we must wonder whether the current measurements will tell us a lot, or that Donity, Harden and Jokic Jus can be seen to show us in the world’s world in the best basketcette.
When players such as Harden, Dončić and Jokic, who are on their way to redefine the NBA play -offs, are generally considered unathletic, it is just another memory of the Evyhit that we still miss when we look at athletics in the traditional way.