The post-up is fine, your timing is the problem

Post play did not become inefficient; it became something teams do at the wrong second of the shot clock.

Post-ups get filed under nostalgia now, somewhere between the drop step and the two handed set shot. The stats back that up if you let them: as a category, post-up possessions return less than a well-run pick and roll, and the gap is not close.

But the category is doing a lot of hidden work in that sentence.

Almost all of those possessions are the same thing. Entry pass at nineteen seconds, big backs his man down for four dribbles, kicks it out, offense restarts with eight left. That is not a post-up. That is a delay tactic that happens to occur near the block, and of course it grades badly, because you have burned half a shot clock to arrive exactly where you started.

Now take the version nobody counts separately. Cross match after a switch, a guard is on your big, and you get the ball on the left block with eleven seconds left against a defense that has already used its rotation on the previous action. One dribble, seal, finish or draw the foul. That possession is enormously valuable and it is being averaged into oblivion by the first version.

The other thing the aggregate hides is what a post-up does to the defense's shape. A genuine deep seal at the low block forces the low man to commit, which is the only reliable way left to move a modern defense that is otherwise perfectly happy to switch everything and stand still. Switching kills your screens. It does not kill a mismatch you can physically bully. That is why teams with a strong bruiser still get easy corner threes late in games and teams without one grind out possessions where nobody is ever open.

So the coaching point is not more post-ups or fewer. It is later post-ups, entered off a switch, with the shooters spaced above the break rather than in the corners, so the kick out arrives to someone with room to attack the closeout instead of someone stuck with the baseline behind him.

The catch, and there is always a catch, is that this only works with a player who can pass out of a double from the block on the move. If your big has to gather, turn and survey, the defense has already recovered. That skill has quietly become rarer than the ability to score down there, and it is the reason the post-up looks worse than it is.