As the 2025 NBA Playoffs are get underway, we are all looking forward to seeing players like Luka Dončić, James Harden and Nikola Jokic rise to the occasion and put on performances to remember. All of them are key players for Western Conference contenders, who could potentially define this year’s playoffs with big performances over the next few weeks. And all of them are superstars in their own right in a league of elite athletes, despite not being considered very athletic by traditional standards.
Over the last few years, however, research has shown that every one of these players possesses athletic skills that set them apart, but are harder to catch if you’re not aware of them, and also harder to quantify.
Slowly but surely, the word athleticism is taking on a new meaning. The prior, most commonly understood definition of athletic — how fast a player can run and how high they can jump — is now deemed too narrow, because we’ve learned that athleticism includes much more nuance and complexity than just the vertical leap and speed.
Timing, change of direction, acceleration, deceleration, coordination, reaction time and force put on the ground are just some of the points that biomechanists and performance coaches at places like the Peak Performance Project (P3) try to measure and map. They have assessed about two-thirds of NBA players and have accumulated data on NBA players for over ten years.
P3 looked at Luka Dončić regularly from the age of 16, when he was just breaking out on Real Madrid, until the start of his NBA career at 19. And they have been on the forefront of trying to measure what physical qualities have made him so successful in the NBA.
What they found was that even if he wasn’t an exceptional leaper or sprinter, he had a lot of skills that clearly indicated that he would make a good NBA player even before he entered the league: above average strength, lateral acceleration and great positional size. But, what really stood out to them, however, was the same thing that they noticed in James Harden years before — Dončić’s “superhuman” braking ability.
Eric Leidersdorf, director of biomechanics at P3, called this quality “the flip side of acceleration”, which is an ability just as effective in basketball. In an interview with Ben Taylor on the Basketball Intelligence podcast a couple of years ago, he talked about the generation of force, saying that “this is when (James) Harden and Luka (Dončić) really start to separate themselves from the pack. Both do an incredible job of generating force when they are slowing down.”
Both had athletic gifts that bubbled beneath the surface, P3 found. This braking ability — or slow step, as 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 at the step-back. This move, which the two have perfected, is not about exploding past a guy on your first step, as much as it is about braking. The brake allows them to send a defender sprawling 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 his braking skills as he gets Kevin Durant on skates in an isolation step-back move ending with an uncontested three-pointer. You clearly see how it’s the braking rather than the explosion that creates the space for Dončić here:
The same can be said about James Harden’s signature step-back:
“While James (Harden) ranks in the 99th percentile in a series of deceleration-related metrics compared to our NBA database, Luka (Dončić) as a teenager ranked in the 93rd percentile. In the same way that James’ athletic gifts bubbled beneath the surface, Luka’s did too,” P3 found.
The chance to study James Harden’s unique braking ability, a skill which often escapes the eye test, helped them understand Luka Dončić’s unique set of skills even before he was drafted. Both players are still breaking down barriers on what athleticism is, and how we should think about it and try to measure it.
Leidersdorf noted that Luka’s braking skills already stood out as a teenager, but wasn’t where it is today.
“Luka’s ability to generate force during this phase was something that he showed a lot of promise in early on, at a young age, but that he has also developed.”
The stopping and going, abrupt braking and decelerating back and forth moves that Dončić is a particular master of and can string together to create space, give him a unique advantage. It has clearly shown to be a type of athleticism that transfers very well to the court.
This play from a couple of years ago showcases that stop-and-go string of moves that Dončić can put together, almost like a rhythmic dance with the defender in isolation:
And it’s impossible to talk about NBA players who have been considered unathletic, but who nevertheless manage to play world-class basketball every night, without mentioning Harden’s first-round opponent, Nuggets star Nikola Jokic. The three-time MVP award winner has been deemed doughy and slow his whole career, but after testing at P3 they found him in fact very athletic — just not in a way we’re used to seeing.
According to Leidersdorf, one thing that stood out about Jokic was “his ability to get off the ground quickly”. Along with what Leidersdorf called his “basketball savant abilities”, his skills continue to set him apart and make him extremely successful in the NBA.
The success of these players over an extended period of time (Dončić was drafted in 2018, Jokic in 2014 and Harden in 2009), despite being considered relatively unathletic, brings up the question whether we need to rethink how we discuss draft prospects in the future.
Are we biased when we see players jump high, too quick to conclude that this will equate to NBA success and thereby potentially missing the more complex athleticism of a future Harden, Luka or Jokic?
Should teams evaluate players differently — maybe by including a wider variety of athletic tests in the combine, perhaps tests similar to that of P3, which caught the unique athleticism of Harden and Dončić early on?
Missing out on major talents like Jokic, who was famously drafted during a Taco Bell commercial as the 41st pick in the second round of the 2014 draft, and who is at the moment widely regarded as the best player in the world, strongly suggests that we need to redefine what athleticism means, and take a closer look at what other skills have the potential to transfer into success on the NBA court.
As we are about to see the next generation of NBA draft prospects evaluated in months to come, we need to ask ourselves whether the current measurements in place will tell us much, or whether Dončić, Harden and Jokic are just the latest to show us that we are looking at athleticism in a too narrow and biased way, which could prevent us from understanding what it actually takes to be successful in the best basketball league in the world.
When players like Harden, Dončić and Jokic, who are on track to once again define the NBA playoffs, are generally considered unathletic, it’s just another reminder of everything we are still missing when we look at athleticism the traditional way.
