As the NBA playoffs of 2025 are launched, we all hope to see players such as Luka Dončić, James Harden and Nikola Jokic on the occasion and we present performances to remember. All of them key players for contestants of the West Conference, which could potentially define this year’s playoffs with great performances during the next weeks. And all of them are superstar in their own right in an elite athletes league, despite not being considered very athletic for traditional standards.
However, approximately in recent years, research has shown that all these players have athletic skills that distinguish the issue, but are more difficult to catch if it is not aware of the issue, and is also more difficult to quantify.
Slow but sure, the word athletics is assuming a new meaning. The previous definition, more commonly understood of athletics, how fast a player can run and how high can jump, now he is considered too narrow, because we have learned that athletics includes much more. Spead.
Time, change of direction, acceleration, deceleration, coordination, reaction time and force that are put on the ground are just some of the points that biomechanists and performance coaches in places like Peak Performance Project (P3) try to measure and map. They have evaluated about two thirds or NBA players and have accumulated data on NBA players for more than ten years.
P3 looked at Luka Dončić regularly from the age of 16, when he was only breaking at Real Madrid, until the beginning of his career in the NBA at age 19. And they have a leg at the forefront of trying to measure what physical qualities have been done.
What they found was that only if it were an exceptional jumper or sprinter, had many skills that clearly indicated that he would be a good NBA player even before entering the league: lateral posterization and grace. But, what really stood out for them, however, was the same thing they noticed in James Harden years before: the “superhuman” braking capacity of Dončić.
Eric Leadersdorf, director of Biomechanics in P3, described this quality as “the other face of acceleration”, which is an equally effective skill in basketball. In an interview with Ben Taylor in the Basketball Intelligence Podcast a couple of years ago, the spoken of force generation, saying that “is when (James) Harden and Luka (Dončić) really approach them by selecting the force. Reducing.”
Both had athletic gifts that bubbled under the surface, found P3. This braking capacity, or slow step, like Luka Dončić has called it, is very abrupt and serves to help create space.
Both Harden and Dončić are, of course, some of the best in the world in the setback. This movement, which the two have perfect, is not about exploiting is adjusted to a boy in your first step, as much as it is about stopping. The brake allows them to send an extended defender in the other direction, creating a good amount of space to shoot before recovering.
In the clip below, Luka Dončić shows his braking skills when he gets Kevin Durant in skates in an isolation movement with a transfer of an unanswered triple. You clearly see how braking is instead of the explosion that creates the space for Dončić here:
The same can be said about the setback of James Harden’s firm:
“While James (Harden) is located in the 99th percentile in a series of metrics related to the deceleration compared to our NBA database, Luka (Dončić) when she was a teenager classified in the 93th percentile. In the same way that James’s athletic gifts bubbled under the surface, Luka also,” he found P3.
The opportunity to study the unique braking capacity of James Harden, a skill that escapes the eye test, helped them understand Luka Dončić’s unique skill set even before being recruited. Both players are still breaking down barriers about what athletics is and how we should think about it and try to measure it.
Leadersdorf said that Luka’s braking skills already stood out when he was a teenager, but it was what he is today.
“Luka’s ability to generate strength in this phase was something that showed many promises in early age, at an early age, but has also developed.”
The stop and the march, braking abruptly and slowing down the movements from one side to another of which Dončić is a private teacher and can join to create space, give him a unique advantage. It has clearly proven to be a type of athletics that is transferred very well to the court.
This work of a couple of years shows that series of movements of stopping and carrying that Dončić can build, almost like a rhythmic dance with the defender in isolation:
And it is impossible to talk about the NBA players who have consulted in the little athletic leg, but that manage to play world -class basketball every night, not to mention the opponent of the first round of Harden, the star of the Nuggets, Nikola Jokic. The three -time MVP winner has been considered Doughy and slow all his career, but after trying in P3 they found him very athletic, not in a way that we are used to seeing.
According to the leaders, one thing that stood out about Jokic was “his ability to take off quickly.” Together with what leaders of leaders called their “basketball wise skills”, their continuous skills to differentiate it and make it extremely successful in the NBA.
The success of these players about a prolonged period of time (Dončić was recruited in 2018, Jokic in 2014 and Harden in 2009), despite being considered relatively little athletic, raises the question of whether we need to rethink how we discuss the perspectives in the future.
Are we biased when we see players jump high, too fast to conclude that it will equate with the success of the NBA and, therefore, will lose the most complex athletics of a future Harden, Luka or Jokic?
Teams should evaluate players differently, perhaps including a broader variety of sports tests in the harvester, perhaps tests similar to those of P3, what caught unique athletics or Harden and Dončić?
Petition of important talents such as Jokic, who was famous during a Taco Bell commercial like the 41st selection in the second round of the 2014 draft, and which is currently widely considered as the best player in the world what we needed, and we are hard and the lights expose our and lights that are our heteros and Ledes are and expensive lights. Look more closely at what other skills have the potential to transfer to success in the NBA court.
As we are about to see that the next generation of NBA Draft prospects evaluated in the coming months, we must ask our current measures in their place will tell us a lot, or if Dončić, hardened and Jokic are only the Latin Latin and the biased form, which could prevent us from understanding what the activity is successful in the best basketball league in the world in the world.
When players like Harden, Dončić and Jokic, who are on their way to the NBA playoffs once again