Board Thread:Versus Debates/@comment-34656247-20180830063430/@comment-34194151-20180908011629

So here is how I have interpreted it. gaara's sand, at every point in time with various skill levels with the sand, was always good at reaction. That was the case even against weightless rock lee, the sand was always able to react to rock lee's first attack. Even with the mizukage clone, gaara's sand clone's sand was able to react to it and block. But that was when he was being blitzed head on. when gaara tried to catch these targets with the sand while the targets were focused purely on evasion, the speed wasn't sufficient without a diversion. The same thing happened with momoshiki, the guy was running circles around the sand until he decided to come in attack gaara, and then gaara reacted to the punch.

That said, Gaara has most certainly improved his sand speed and reactions, but how exactly would that scale to minato and itachi? Minato is still faster than momoshiki in a sense because he can utilize FTG and use gaara's sand against him, and itachi prefers mid-range, so he would be more focused on evasion, while using fire balls and exploding clone/crow clone to create openings. It depends on how well you think these two would perform in comparison to the new generation of kage like darui etc, maybe there is some power inflation going on here that I have neglected, so I'll have to look into that more. Gaara certainly has a way better shot then his shippuden variants.