When do you jump, what actually earns the block (does your hand have to pass through the ball?), and is goaltending driven by height or Blocks rating — LeBron looks like the best at it post-nerf, and he's neither the tallest nor the highest-rated blocker.
How to test: Camp a blocker in the paint against the same repeated shot and isolate one variable at a time. TIMING: jump at different points of the ball's descent — as it peaks, mid-fall, right at the rim — and log which windows produce blocks. CONTACT: watch replays for whether your hand visibly passes through the ball on successful goaltends, or whether blocks register from proximity/animation without clean contact. ATTRIBUTION: run the identical setup with LeBron (4 blocks, 6'9"), then a crowned-blocks big (Wemby 7'4", El Gigante 7'7"), then a low-blocks guard — if height or Blocks rating drives it, the ordering will show; if timing dominates, they'll all land it. Note shot type (jumper, floater, layup) — arc time changes everything.
Every player knows the move: instead of contesting the shooter, you camp your blocker under the basket and jump as the shot drops toward the rim. In real basketball that’s goaltending and a whistle; in The Run there is no whistle — the swat is legal, the bucket doesn’t count, and rim-camping has been a core defensive strategy since launch.
It was strong enough that the developers stepped in. The August 10 patch notes “extended near hoop dead zone and reduced block jump height boost” — their words — to curtail goaltending. Not a rule change: a geometry change. The area right at the hoop where blocks don’t fire got bigger, and blockers jump lower inside it.
What the nerf did and didn’t do
It didn’t kill the move. Our own post-patch sessions confirm LeBron still eats shots on the way down. The window shrank; the strategy survived.
The mechanics underneath have never been mapped, and those are the actual open questions:
- When do you jump? As the ball peaks? Mid-fall? Right at the rim? Nobody has pinned down which part of the descent is the live window — or how much the Aug 10 nerf moved it.
- What earns the block? Does your hand have to visibly pass through the ball, or does the game grant it from position and timing — an animation that fires when you’re close enough? Replays of successful goaltends would settle this fast.
- Height or Blocks rating — or neither? Here’s the puzzle: LeBron looks like the best goaltender in the game post-nerf, and he’s a 4-blocks, 6’9“ card. If raw Blocks or height drove it, crowned-blocks towers like Wemby (7’4“) and El Gigante (7’7“) should be strictly better — and nobody has verified that they are. Timing, jump animation, or something else entirely may matter more than the sheet says.
- Against which shots? High-arc jumpers hang longest and should be easiest to time; floaters and layups get to the rim faster. Where’s the line now?
- Is rim-camping still worth it? You’re leaving the shooter uncontested to eat the shot at the rim — and the same patch buffed dunk consistency, which punishes a paint-camper who can’t reach the driver.
The jump height experiment is directly connected — the same notes confirmed block jump gets a contextual boost near the rim (now reduced) while rebounder jump height went up. The game tunes jump by action, and goaltending lives or dies on exactly that tuning.
How to help
Run the setup in the methodology and post results in the Evidence Locker — who you blocked with, when in the descent you jumped, what shot types you could still eat at the rim, and whether replays show clean hand-on-ball contact. If Wemby or El Gigante goaltend better OR worse than LeBron for you, that single comparison is the most valuable clip anyone can post right now.
Related: the August 10 patch thread, jump height, and Block Party — where a goaltend is worth actual points.
Evidence Locker
Sign in to contribute- No findings yet — run a test and post what you see.
Frequently asked
Q. Is goaltending a violation in NBA The Run?
No. There's no whistle — blocking the ball on its way down at the rim is legal and always has been. It's an arcade game and this is a deliberate part of it. The game balances rim-camping with geometry instead of a rule: the August 10, 2026 patch extended the dead zone near the hoop and reduced the block jump height boost there to make it harder, not illegal.
Q. Does goaltending still work after the August 10 patch?
Yes. Our own post-patch sessions confirm LeBron can still meet shots on the way down at the rim — the nerf shrank the window rather than closing it. How much smaller it got, and whether it now effectively requires elite blocks and height, is what this experiment is measuring.