og15 wrote:Luka posting up Ayton was just great, the size and strength of the man combined with guard handles is just killer.
This is the beauty of a good postup game. And it's something Dirk discovered, or at least leveraged more, later in his career. It works on everyone. At some point or another, you can use certain post moves to gain separation from any kind of defender. You find your comfortable range and your pet moves and boom, it becomes this nasty tool you can abuse, time and again. There is value to consistency on offense, and there is value to adding an element like that when something a little more fickle and high-variance like your 3pt shot isn't going. And if they're gonna put little PGs on Luka, then that's a horrible idea. And he has a reasonably robust frame and demonstrable willingness to get rough in the paint, so if it works against forwards and centers, well... Watch out.
og15 wrote:The other addition for him is that he's such a good passer that teams don't want to go overly crowd him inside there. Guys who aren't good passers or even guys who aren't as good passers are less "open" in some of those close ranges because the defender is content sending multiple bodies and contests knowing they aren't likely to make any great pass.
I remember later Magic Johnson, and I'm not saying Luka is there but the stylistic comparison to how he's starting to make plays from the post is something I used to absolutely adore about older Magic. 89-91, even in his little 96 comeback, just ruining people from the right mid-post or whatever? Hilarious. Left wing backdowns from the 3pt line? Yes, please. And god forbid you get him actually with a foot IN the paint...
Harden simply doesn't have anything close to the variety of his game on offense that Luka does. Being very strong in certain areas is great, and in general being a master or something vs jack of all trades without being great anywhere is better. But, you better be able to still do those things against all defenses, and of course if you are a master of some and then really good at other things vs just being a jack of all trades and average at everything, that's a whole different addition to your game.
Harden's problem is the problem with over-leveraging the 3 in general, and something we see with even Steph at times: a 40% 3 is highly efficient and that's shooting very well from that range, but you still miss 60% of the time. You're gonna have wildly hot and cold runs, and that will dramatically alter your efficacy. Harden doesn't really showcase much middle game. Steph, at least, has floaters and mid-range jumpers and pull-ups and whatever, he has an array of stuff he often goes to when his 3 isn't falling, plus he's quite effective at manipulating his own defensive gravity (as everyone on Ben Taylor's Discord collectively groans) to effect as well. Harden... does little of that. He dribbles between his legs, takes the layup if he can, throws himself around for a phantom foul or takes a stepback 3. Doncic already has a LOT more middle game than Harden, enough so that they don't really look all that similar as players. And because Harden has so much less middle game, he is a capricious, feast-or-famine kind of player from a scoring perspective.
