Kick out ranges nudge
Maybe he does, but the outranging range is also the "easy to dodge" range.
There's a safe zone to kick, and in this one, nudge is king.
I kicked a 1h coming to me, saw the animation started,
then got nudged, wich is faster, stopped my animation, in addition to stunning me for a good bit.
On the paper kick may outrange nudge, but effectively, thanks to the animation, you can't kick a nudger before he nudges you. And once he does, AND you've failed your kick, you can't counter kick (not sure if there's a timer for kick, even after a fail kick, but i think so), thus, a free hit...