Exploring Eco Psych with Gray Thomas

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast hosted by Alex Sarama. This is the podcast helping coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to provide the ultimate resource for making sense of applying contemporary skill acquisition ideas within basketball.

Within this podcast, Alex and his guests unpack how an ecological dynamics framework Impacts our perspective of the game. If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, this is the podcast for you.

Welcome back to the Transforming Podcast. Today we're joined by Transforming Basketball contributor Gray Thomas. Gray and I have got to know each other in particular over the last 6 months, and we just had some really great in-depth discussions about everything ecological dynamics and its application in basketball.

Gray is a PhD student at the legendary University of Connecticut, where they have one of the leading departments of ecological psychology in the world. And Gray's also got a particular subject interest and experience in basketball. So obviously, when you blend those 2 things together, it's a pretty amazing match.

Gray, it's a pleasure to have you on today.

Man, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Like you said, The University of Connecticut, the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action. I found this out the other day. It's the only place where you can get your PhD in ecological psychology.

Now there's other areas and, you know, places that you can do like that. So saying that, and then finding Transforming Basketball, which seems to be the only ecological dynamics approach to basketball, I feel like I'm in this really unique position where I've just met these wonderful people talking about the game I love from the perspective that I love.

So it's been really cool, especially the last couple of months getting to know you.

Oh, absolutely. So just for your background, Graeme, it would be amazing if you could just explain to the listeners kind of, I think, how you got involved and how you got interested in this subject area and kind of what even what that looks like.

And this is going to be a long, probably a long answer because I think it might be good to touch on just the roots of what ecopsych is and kind of how it differs to cognitive theories. And then later we'll get to what that means for basketball coaches and practitioners.

Absolutely. So I graduated from, uh, I got my master's from the University of Central Oklahoma from a traditionally cognitivist institution, which hopefully that becomes a little clearer what I mean in just a little bit. And my, so my master's was in experimental psychology and my thesis was on prospective memory.

I got kind of obsessed with the idea of you need memory to do things in the future, right? So prospective memory is the idea that you set a current intention. for something you plan to do in the future. Right. So I need to take the trash out, but on Thursday I need to give my neighbor the mail when they get back in town, different things like that.

And I kind of got really obsessed with the idea that a current intention has to become a future memory. Right. So I went down this rabbit hole and got really into it. And it really bumps up against the habit formation literature, which is something I'm also really passionate about.

All this kind of like sort of surrounded when I got a lot healthier, I got in shape and had lost a lot of weight. And people had asked me kind of, How did you go about that? What were you doing? You know, what were your habits?

I would intuitively speak about reminders and, you know, making sure I would make something attractive or easier, like limit kind of the friction to doing something. So that's like the basis of how I even came to cognitive psychology and the idea of routines and habits and getting to where you're going to be.

Right. And so when it came time to look for graduate schools, I had a couple of different options and my advisor. had really, really encouraged me to look into the University of Connecticut. She had always kind of pushed this alternative approach. Nobody really knew what she was talking about.

Now I know exactly what she was talking about in retrospect. And I write her frequently like, wow, how did you know all these things? You know, she was in this little pocket in Oklahoma talking about dynamical systems theory, you know, nonlinear growth and development and all these different things and would encourage us to kind of think about things differently.

So she, we were talking one day and she really pushed me to really check out the University of Connecticut. And so I did. Thankfully I got an offer. So I've been out here for the last 2 and a half years. And when I got here, I didn't realize what I had officially gotten into.

I kind of came to ecological psychology through the back door in the sense of I was at sort of the mecca of it and didn't realize that it was a kind of a drastically different approach. And when I say drastic, it's because it really tears down the walls of the foundations of a lot of things in psychology that we hold near and dear, like the idea of memory as this storehouse of that holds like these representations of events, facts, numbers, things you've learned that you're able to pull out at any given moment and all these

different things, right? Or that perception, the way we perceive the world is based off these little tiny little bits of light that we accumulate together, take that raw information. And somewhere inside of us, we add this little bit of reasoning and then all of a sudden reality is constructed.

Right. So these are things I had never even questioned. I had just taken for granted. And so my first couple of weeks here, we started taking— there's 2 main courses here. It's perception. And then there's action. Really it's perception, action, perception, action, because, you know, they're intricately interwoven.

And so I started taking a couple of weeks in. I raised my hand and I remember asking Dr. James Dixon, our director, I said, so what do we, you know, how does memory factor into this? And he kind of chuckled and he goes, oh, we'll get to that.

Or we won't. And, uh, you know, that was one of those things that like, I was too new to like, be like, what the hell do you mean, dude? So I kind of like laughed and nodded and it really bothered me for a few days.

Cause I was like, man, my entire thesis was about this. What have I gotten into? Did I make a huge mistake? And so really ecological psychology kind of just tears away some of your basic assumptions about how we perceive the world and how we're able to move through it.

Right. And a lot of that began at like, they tear this thing down to the studs. I thought it would be okay, here is the most cutting-edge research from the 2020s and all these different things. And what it's turned out to be is they take you all the way back to Aristotle, Plato, take you through Descartes and really talk about like Why the dominant approach is the way it is.

Funnily enough, it kind of goes back to Galileo looking up at the moon and the stars and the planets and realizing, wait, they can't possibly be that close, you know, or that far away based off the size of these things. And that kind of really prompted this idea that, oh, reality isn't as we seem, right?

So we're kind of constructing reality off of something. So what's doing that? It's gotta be something inside, right? Because The matter that makes up all life, all of Earth, the universe, everything like that. It's inert, it's passive, it must be pushed, right? And so this ties neatly with Newtonian mechanics.

So you think of like billiard balls hitting each other, you know, going in particular ways or ball being pushed down a hill. It's these forces that move these things and that's it. That's the only way things are going to be moved, right? Well, it turns out if you follow that far enough along that ideology and start you start bumping up against, well, what's doing the pushing?

What's doing the moving? How are we, you know, how are we able to remember this? What's taking this retinal image, which is part of the traditional approach. The traditional approach to psychology says that it is very representation-based in the sense that we store representations in whatever form they may take.

And whether that's audio, you know, image-based, or however you want to interpret what representations means, they take that, right? And we use these constantly. We use these representations additively, subtractively. We, we compute different representations, our representation of what a dog is, what solid ground may be.

And if we're able to approach it, right, we're doing all these quick processing methods, computing methods, inferential, inferring all the time. Right. That's the traditional approach. And really when you start asking, well, what's doing the moving, what's moving the non-mover, so to speak.

Yeah.

There has to be, what's the intelligent process that we're talking about here? Well, when you start asking that, you kind of run into the little man theory, the homunculus theory. There's something in there pulling it, you know, pushing the right keys on the cortical keyboard.

That used to be a dominant theme in motor theory that you were, the cortical keyboard was being pressed in a particular way to move in a particular way. Think of like a puppeteer or things like that. Well, turns out you can't find unmoved mover anywhere.

Right. And so that leads to further and troubling questions, right? Well, if that's not doing that, then how can we do these things? Right. And it turns out there's been a dominant theory, not a dominant theory, but a really prominent theory in dynamical systems theory.

You see this in self-organization in chemical systems, things like the BZ reaction. There's all sorts of non-living systems that exhibit this complex behavior and motion that we see across all organisms. Right. And so. We see, I went from, okay, well, how do we remember to do things in the future?

You know, and trying to pit these 2 processes of spontaneous retrieval and attentional monitoring and all these cues. So when does a chair go from being a chair to being, oh, that's my grandmother's chair. I need to go give her her medication. You know, when does it turn into a reminder?

There's some, you know, there was never a clear answer for me on that. So when I got here, the first thing I did is I Took my thesis and wrote it from an ecological perspective and really tried to explain how we're able to remember, you know, continue to do things that we had intended to do at a previous point.

Right.

And so I butted up against all of those different things and kind of really start— it really started to click with me that we're picking up information, right? We're not taking in sensory, raw sensory data and feeding it through this hyper-speed information processing supercomputer of a brain.

And that brain is magically reconstructing reality and moving us simultaneously in the face of all of the randomness that life has to throw to us. Right. And I started to take concepts like the retinal image, right? So the retinal image is the idea that light shines through the eye and it's projected to the back of the eye and it creates an image of whatever, you know, the viewer is viewing.

Yeah.

This was really dominant for a really long time in terms of how we saw things. Well, this was from experiments they did on dead oxen. And well, it turns out when the organism is dead and you shine a light through it, you're going to get this translucent kind of film where you can see things on the back.

So that's not really representative of what's happening in real life. So if you think about right now, my retinal image would be computer screen, a monitor, my microphone. And I'm taking it in and applying it to memory, my memory of stored concepts, like of what a computer is, what conversation is like, to construct what's going on.

And to do that in real time, at every different angle that your head could possibly move and all these different things, it's just not really tractable. Right. So that's kind of how I came into it. I came into it with my guard up and the more reading I did, and then the more questions I kept running into and asking.

My favorite thing that ecological psychology and James Gibson do is they just propose the problem, right? Like they put the problem out there in the sense of like, this is hard. How are we doing these things? Let's really, really think about it. Okay.

Let's grant that we may be indirectly perceiving these things and adding sensory data, inferring what reality is and moving accordingly. Is that at what timescales are these happening? And, you know, and that warranted it, that caused all this further investigation. And things that just really didn't add up.

And so that's when I got really into James Gibson stuff and direct perception and the idea that we're picking up information. And that's really, it's not just like changed my life academically. It's changed everything in terms of how I relate to people, speak to people, how I work, you know, a different thing.

Like I'm more in tune with just the information that my body's telling me in conjunction with, you know, what all is going on. It's not just In a vacuum, you should be able to do these things at all times. Right. And that's really heavy on the perception side of things.

And that's before getting into like motor programs with action. So the one thing was, okay, what are we perceiving? Is the world really as it is? That's a hard enough question that most people don't really want to give a second thought about. And then the next thing is, how are we doing the things that we're doing every day?

And not even like on the scale that we talk about here at Transforming Basketball, like fast break, anything like that. How are we reaching for a glass? How are we standing constantly, you know, and able to move and do these different things? And so you go down these different theories and I think the most lasting and impactful takeaway is that it's from the Bernstein stuff.

We'd never repeat the same motion twice, even though we do the same action all the time, right? Like the outcome. And that Nikolai Bernstein did these experiments with blacksmiths. who would be hammering nails, essentially experts in their field. And it's a very constrained, for the most part, task, you know, very close, you know what you're getting, you know what the outcome is going to be.

And so you would think like the best ones in the world, they would do the same motion every time, like Steph Curry shooting a 3-pointer, right? You would think it's the same form every single time. And they're just better at getting into that and can do it regularly all the time.

Well, they found out, no, it's a different trajectory every time, but the outcome's the same, right? Like. Different joint rotation, different torque, you know, different angle of the arm, different speed approaching, different speed landing, different initial velocity and different things like that. Right.

There's all these amazing number of combinations that can produce the same outcome. And that really kind of kicked the door open in terms of what's possible with action and how we can apply it to everything. Right. And so my initial, I love basketball.

I've always loved basketball. I played it. I watch it, I play it on PlayStation. You know, it's my favorite sport in the world. I think it's the only game, only major sport that you can really continue to play almost your entire life. Like whether it's by yourself or with one other person or up and down runs, whatever it's going to be.

I mean, if you've got a ball and a hoop, you can go out there and you can replicate a whole lot of what goes on. You know, it's hard to do that with baseball. You can go on a machine, do different things like that.

Football, I don't even know what you're doing. Soccer, maybe, you know, but basketball is just so fun and I've always been drawn to it and really love it. And I just remember some of my coaches and some of the direction they gave and how kind of context independent it was.

Like, you need to focus on this particular form of free throw shooting. Don't fade away from the basket. You know, I was good at shooting fadeaways. Well, I couldn't jump very high. So part of what, but I was kind of tall. So what helped me was fading away from the basket and I could make that.

They would get really, really mad at me. And I was like, am I not good because I don't have this ideal form? And I started thinking about these different things now that I had this new knowledge and trying to apply it in all these different ways.

And then I kind of came across the things that you'd been doing and it really just cracked it all open for me and really inspired a lot of what I'm working on for my dissertation and different things like that. I know that was a whole, whole bunch, kind of a history lesson and a personal statement all at once, but you know.

No, it's great, great. There's a lot to unpack there. I think maybe what I'd like to start with is the implications of ecological psychology for coaches. Maybe we'll touch on practitioners in other roles, but maybe what would you say are the most evident for all the people listening to this, whether they're a front office person in the NBA or they're a coach working with beginners?

What does ecological psychology mean to them and why does it matter?

Okay. That's a great question. I think without having to do your own PhD or, you know, go through the literature like you have and done your own work on that, you can pick up really good intuitive pieces. Like for example, one of the most intuitive things about ecological psychology is the idea of affordances.

We see this everywhere and without even really adhering to the theory or knowing what they're talking about, you know, like, oh, this affords me more time to do this, so on and so forth. So I think The idea of affordances is really a good starting point because it, from there, so many other different things flow, right?

The neat thing about affordances is yes, there are some that are probably universal in terms of as long as there is a human right on the earth, a solid ground will afford bipedal walking, right? So to speak. But depending on how hilly that ground may be, an older person may not find that as walkable.

So.

Yeah.

Let's apply this to coaches and players, right? Taking what one player may be afforded, right? And you use this example in your book quite a bit. Isolation play with maybe 15 seconds left and there's some space. And you put Steph Curry, you put Giannis, and you put Nikola Jokic all in the same spot on the same court, right?

Let's just say it's the same scenario. Let's just say they're playing the same opponent, right? They're going to see things differently. They're going to perceive things differently. Based off of what they're able to do with that situation, right? Like, that's really, really important because to me, it shows that there's an objective side of things, right?

We have, this is the scenario. This is the reality of it. There's 5 players. There's a certain amount of space. There's a clock ticking down, right? There's some objective component to it, but there's also a subjective component to it. And I think when you're thinking about players and your team or your organization or whatever you're working with, You need to keep that subjective component in mind.

And that is not just what is this person good at on the court? What are they like off the court? What motivates them? What is their life like? What, what has their basketball experience been like up to this point? What is their training like?

And realizing it's not a one-size-fits-all approach, right? You need to be able to be adaptable, flexible, and all these different scenarios based off the personnel that you have and not just them be flexible and adapt, but you need to be flexible and adaptable to them.

Right. I don't think— not everybody gets the Dennis Rodman and the Draymond Green coaching treatment, right? You have to understand your personnel and adapt accordingly. I guarantee you Steve Kerr doesn't love the things that Draymond has done, right? I don't think Phil Jackson absolutely was in love with the idea of Rodman going to Vegas, you know, in the middle of the Finals.

But he did it and understood, these are the guys I have. They can do other things. Maybe they even need to do certain things.

Yeah.

To get them in a particular mindset to go out and be great. And that's kind of an example of the, of how you can just take like basic principles in the sense of, okay, I can objectively design, you know, look at what's going on here, but I need to be subjective to my personnel and design environments that will foster growth, whether that's in training, whether that's in practice on the bus, you know, what's the lock.

Mark Cuban was big on this. He changed the locker room at the Mavericks, right? He was one of the first ones to ever have a really nice locker room with the really cush, you know, seating and all this stuff in there. Now it's commonplace, but at the time people wanted to go to the Mavericks because it fostered a little bit, you know, better of an environment, more conducive to enjoyment, enjoying being there.

Right. So I think keeping those things in mind are probably at the forefront without Like having to get in the nitty-gritty details of the theory, right? Because a lot of, a lot of times you don't have the time for that, whether you're at, you know, the youth level, the high school, college prep level, even at the pro level, you usually only have limited time with these guys.

You know, you don't typically get someone for their entire career and get to understand them. So you're not going to have the time to dive into the theory and all these different things and make sure you understand it as thorough as You know, any academic, and that's okay.

Like, you're good at what you do, please keep doing it. But if you keep these things in mind and work on that with your players and you design these flexible, adaptable, growing growth environments, I think you'll see a lot of results without having to be the smartest person in the room or appeal to be able to give a presentation on it.

Right. I think that's probably the biggest one.

Yeah. And obviously doing classical drills is not the way to go about developing those players. So obviously not. With the podcast, great, we've got— we built up a good following. I think a lot of people now know what the CLA is, etc. But I think just in case someone's, you know, revisiting this or new to the subject area, could you just make the link for us between ecological psychology and ecological dynamics and maybe how that impacts how we coach in terms of how an ecological dynamics rationale manifests itself in the CLA?

Yeah, absolutely. So One thing that I think is important about ecological psychology is it predates sports science. It wasn't made for it, wasn't born out of the need for it or anything like that. Ecological psychology, and this really started with Hume, the philosopher Hume, who kind of developed an idea of perception that, okay, it allowed the idea that animals perceived at the same scale that humans did.

It at least kind of touched on it. It's called Hume's touchstone in a lot of Michael Turvey's work. Well, James Gibson took this idea and just exploded with it, right? Like the idea was that if we're going to, you know, really talk about how we're able to do these amazing things every day, we need a psychology that is for all organisms about perception and action, right?

So how do birds move in and around their environment like they do all the way down to single-celled organisms, right? So ecological psychology was for that in the sense of Developing an idea, a theory of how every living thing is able to perceive and act in the world the way that they are.

Right. And dynamical systems theory was also being developed for some time. And it is the perfect companion. It's incorporated into ecological psychology, whether it's explicitly stated in the early works or not. But Keith Davids was a big, big proponent of kind of marrying ecological psychology to dynamical systems theory, which is really the science of, you know, complex adaptive systems and the way we're able to self-organize and do these different things, how you, how systems behave essentially.

And so this marriage kind of happened. And from there, the CLA was essentially born because if you look at it, right, manipulating constraints, right. That goes all the way back to ecological psychology. We, we operate within the constraints that we live in. So one of the early, or one of the things I loved with Gibson's stuff is he talks about how we need to talk about the terrestrial scale, right?

So we're not talking like, yeah, we can talk about the cosmic scale and like maybe make a few educated guesses about what's going on and depending on our measurement systems. And that same goes for the quantum scale, but let's talk about like where humans and animals actually live and get their work done, so to speak.

And so I think That right there is already talking about the constraints of the organism, like bringing it to the terrestrial scale. Right. And so why is it that some people, we see this in accents, right? You know, dialects, national dialects and different things.

The constraints are different. What you're exposed to, what you're not exposed to, the frequency of that exposure, all these different things, they manifest in all sorts of daily life. Right. Well, let's take it over to sports. And the beautiful thing about sports is they're perfect.

And this is a big part of my dissertation work and why I'm pushing for it. Sports are a perfect playground for ecological psychology and ecological dynamics research because they're so well— the constraints are so well-defined in terms of rules of the game, the environment, you know, in terms of the court, the field, whatever you may be on, but the dynamics are as rich as anything you'll see, you know, anywhere in the world.

Right. And so I think the CLA is really kind of a perfect extension from ecological psychology, you know, developing why the Difflugia, a single-celled organism, can build a shell that it goes out and gets pieces for its shell, and it never gets a piece that's too big to go into the hole.

Right. So that shows that there's a retrospective, a prospective, and a flexible component, right? It may not go out and see the exact piece that it needs. Based off where it is that day, those constraints may change. And then as that shell changes, it's finding different pieces to match that, right?

So as the shell changes, the constraints change, the behavior begets behavior and so on and so forth. If you transfer that over to sports, it makes all the sense in the world. Right. And so I think it's just a really natural kind of extension from ecological psychology, but scaled up to a particular domain.

But the CLA, in my opinion, is a just good refined approach without— if you can understand the CLA, I think you get the gist of ecopsych without having to get into the nitty-gritty of the theory.

Yeah, completely. So what I wanted to do now, Graham, we've spoken about this, is, yeah, look at how we can use, you know, the CLA, the underpinnings of ecological psychology, to really explain and rebut some misnomers that we're seeing within the basketball world.

And, and what some people are saying about a CLA. You know, I think at Transforming Basketball, we're not going to mention names because we want to be a positive vehicle for change.

Absolutely.

And do it in a very different way. But at the same time, we both feel quite passionately that we can't let these myths continue to perpetuate, which are completely unfounded. So, right, I think the first one I wanted to look at was the idea that skills are acquired.

Okay.

And, you know, some people are talking about how they've identified, you know, every skill possible and that you need to be teaching technique players to acquire these skills and that they don't just self-organize within the environment, blah, blah, blah.

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That one probably bothers me the most in the sense of just handing someone a book is not conducive to A, learning it, or B, replicating it in any kind of way, shape, or form in any domain, anything you do. We have all, like, we all have Google.

You know what I mean? We all have YouTube. We can see every move, anything we want. But if your body is not like, I didn't have a Michael Jordan body. He was my favorite player. You know, I said, I shot that, you know what I'm saying?

And so like, I watched him as much as anyone. I knew his moves as well as anyone, you know, back in the day. One, I couldn't repeat them for a variety of reasons, but two, that's not who I was. That's not how I was constituted.

Right. And so my skills developed in different ways based off what I was capable of. And so to think that like skills are acquired, it kind of assumes that you can be Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet and just go out there and go get like, oh, I've got my hesitation crossover.

Next, I'm going to get my fadeaway from the elbow. And you just do these different things. And all of a sudden you can do absolutely everything. We see that's just not the case, right? Like one, players are constantly changing. You know, they're constantly changing.

They're getting older. They're the way they're getting in shape is changing. One example is Anthony Davis. He bulked up a lot with muscle, you know, for the Lakers. His game has changed. You know, he's less fluid. He's still dominant, but he's a different kind of player, right?

I guarantee you he didn't like forget how to do certain things, but because of what he's able to do and with the ease he's able to do those things, it's kind of changed how he operates on the court. So, and this goes back to the memory thing, right?

If memories aren't stored in any particular place and pulled out at the ideal time and location, Then how can we expect that movement patterns and skills are done in that way? So that, like, that was the whole thing with motor program theory is the idea was that, oh, you learn how to do one thing and there's this muscle memory for it, so to speak.

And then everything else is a matter of running the program, running the program and getting more efficient at just running that program. Right. That's just not what's happening here. And if you may have the entire dictionary of skills available to you, you may be that level of player.

But if this, if the right defenses aren't, you're not going to have access to all of those things. You know, the reason, a big reason Kareem could shoot a skyhook, there wasn't a lot of people contending it, you know, at that level. He created these different spaces.

If there was a lot of Victor Wembanyamas out there and different things that made that shot more difficult or less difficult for him, you would have seen more or less frequency with that. You know, so the constraints kind of dictate what skills are going to emerge anyway.

So the idea that you can go out there and accumulate all these things and then just Imbue them on the court at will. It's just not practical and it's refuted in science, which some people don't care about. I think you should care about to at least some degree, especially if you're serious about your craft, but identifying things.

So what we've been doing that since the dawn of time, it's, you know, there's category theory, but when you zoom in on any category, the one that's closest to it, the line gets blurry, more and more blurry. The more you zoom in, what differentiates just calling something a bird or a penguin or a hawk, right?

It's the level of specificity and the context of which it emerges in that you're talking about these things. Right. So it's the same with identifying skills. I just don't think being able to point to something and call it a skill and say like, well, that guy did that and that guy did that.

Yeah. It's the same with the 20 blacksmiths along the railroad doing the same thing. They all hit the nail on the head, but they may have done it in different ways and gotten there in a different manner. So I, that's kind of my take on that.

I don't think the idea that you're just going to have, like a lot of people reference like a tool belt, so to speak, that you can, you know, that's another metaphor that's used. It's not bad. I get the intuitiveness of it. Like you want to work on more aspects of your game.

Yes. It's nice to be able to do different shots confidently, but that doesn't mean that once you've made 40% of your hook shots or your corner 3s, that like, that's in your pocket. You know what I mean? that constantly has to be engaged with.

It's like riding a bike, you know, that metaphor. Well, you know what's hard? Riding a bike after 10 years of not riding a bike. Like you'll still get on, but you're going to struggle. You're going to like be imbalanced. It's going to take a little bit of time to get that back.

And it's the same with skills.

I think that's great. And I think at the end of the day, we know that movement is not intentional. It's not intentionally controlled. I want to— intentionally controlled, right? Players, the athletes can have intentions. which I think are influenced by principles of play, you know, what the coach is doing, but they're not thinking, all right, I am going to use this footwork right now in this situation.

I think that's one of the strongest things, you know, underpinning the ideas we share. And yet the biggest problem to the, you know, the alternative approach, people, coaches are assuming that that's how it works, but we know that's not the case. You know, on this note, I think one of the biggest changes we've made at Transforming is we probably shifted our terminology.

We used to call it the traditional approach.

Right.

You know, in the book, I was very intentional about calling it the dominant approach. And I think, you know, what we see with the dominant approach is a lot of coaches who we could say are definitely not conventional in terms of they're not teaching fundamentals as we've seen necessarily from the proposed drills, but they're still doing things like using props or, you know, like flashing lights and things of that nature.

For us, we would still consider that the dominant approach because regardless of whether it's a coach doing something like, chest passes or zigzag drill or coach using props, we consider them exactly the same in the same category. Could you explain why that's the case, Greg?

I think that's a great question. So my mind immediately goes to the idea of even speaking about control. Okay. So information-based control versus affordance-based control, why we would say that the props and the zigzags and different things like that, you're not really creating or representing any kind of affordance landscape that you would see in a game, right?

People aren't hitting you with pads and doing different things. You know, if you have limited time and availability and you need a coaching staff who's going to like actually contest a shot and he's 5'10, I get, you know, a little bit here and there, but it's not going to ever be representative of what's going on with the game, right?

So in information-based control, the idea is that there's always information available to what it will take to do the thing. Okay. So Brett Fagen did this work. He talked about it. Uh, he used this analogy. There's always going to be an answer for how much force do I need to apply to stop before I hit the wall, right?

There's always a physics-based answer, right? But that does not indicate what is actually possible or not. And so that's where affordance-based control comes in, is the information to stop Based off of what I'm capable of. If I'm going 60 miles an hour in a car and I start braking, you know, half a mile out before a wall, I'm going to be fine.

If I try and do that 200 feet away from the wall, that's not going to be the case, but there is a physics-based answer for what it would take to stop right there.

Right.

There's information, you know, for what it would take, but that doesn't remotely indicate what's possible. Right. Just like with those kinds of contrived drills with props and different things like that. You're not really showing what's possible out there, right? You're creating a different kind of environment and something that you're practicing different types of affordances, right?

Like the ability to shoot over one of those pool noodles or whatever people use, you know, different things like that. That's not representative of like how the closeout is going to appear for that player or different things like that. So again, it goes back to the objective and subjective component, right?

Like this thing's probably going to happen. But it's gonna look different based off who the player is and what they're capable of. So I think those kinds of drills, even going beyond the on-air stuff, really don't get at the heart of like what the player is capable of or not capable of, or pushing them towards being more capable, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, I think that's, that's great. So yeah, and I think for me it's also, it's really different how we do things. Like if we use props, it's a very short dose and it's something like an Aqua Bag. Yeah. And that's the only prop really we use unless it's a warmup and I have some crash mats out.

But it's like, to the players, create your own activity. And they often do stuff that's variable and gamified anyway. But then when I'm using AquaBags, it's to decouple, to expand action capacities. And then we're putting them back in a CLA. And we're doing it for that reason.

We're not doing it because we think it makes their skills better. It doesn't. We're expanding the affordances that they can act upon. Right.

Absolutely.

I think the whole thing with props.

Absolutely. And I think, you know, as long, like, if you're going to do props, like, have a theory behind it, you know, like you said, why you're doing it, you said to either limit action capacity or facilitate it, whatever it may be. But if you're not doing it for a particular learning or development reason, then you're just kind of wasting your time, in my opinion.

Absolutely.

So next one we wanted to get at, Greg, is the idea of reductionism. And I think this is how I started the book. You know, one of the biggest kind of things we have in basketball is that we can isolate components and then by putting them back together, we get the full package.

And we see that not just in coaching, but a lot of sports science, physical therapy, the weight room. Could you quickly touch upon why reductionism, as we saw in Taylorism, is not the way to go?

Yeah, absolutely. Kind of like we talked about, one, reducing things like higher-order actions are not like, even with the blacksmith thing, You can't reduce it down to particular joint angles, torque, initial velocity, or different things. You can come up with millions of different combinations of those things, but you can't reduce it to an additive thing of those things, right?

Real quick, there's just like a couple of studies. I think this one is probably the most telling of kind of what we're talking about. So Higuchi and their colleagues, they had participants who were American football. They'd have them run through gaps and then they would also in other trials have them self-report their shoulder width.

Well, football players had more efficient shoulder rotations than non-football players. So they were more attuned to that particular affordance landscape. They've interacted with that environment. They've worked through it. Neither group was good at reporting shoulder width. And shoulder width, you would argue, is a component of these shoulder rotations going through gaps, you know, running through and doing these different things.

Well, since neither group was good at it, it indicates that these kind of higher-order relationships Such as, is the gap passable or is it not? It's not computed from smaller components, but they're perceived directly as a whole, right? Like so-and-so open through this passing lane or not.

Well, it's not going to be constructed based off, well, if I throw the ball 15 miles an hour or throw a bounce pass, you know, and they're moving at this particular pace and at this distance, it's not computed from that. And another study showed that Jeff Wagman and all People at Illinois State, they would have participants reach with a stick and without a stick.

And they would have them talk about their, I believe it was their shoulder height and arm length and stick length. And they would ask them each of those things and individually adding those things up did not add up to their actual maximum reaching height.

So it's showing that like, when you try and deconstruct these things, it's not even remotely intuitive, even in the most basic things as reaching or going through a gap. Right. So Harjeet Singh has done a lot of work on attentional focus, same kind of thing here, right?

Like when you have an external attention of focus in terms of, I'm going to shoot a free throw as opposed to I'm going to keep my elbow in, raise it, release off my fingertip, you know, follow through and break it down that way.

People who have that internal focus of attention tend to do worse than those who have external focus of attention. And that scales with expertise. But those are 3 really salient examples of you can't just add the small things together to get the big thing, right?

So the next— kind of got 2 more misnomers I want to unpack here. The next one is the idea that ecological dynamics cannot— and evidence-based approaches in general, you know, you can apply them in things like nutrition, sports science, but they're not as applicable in actual coaching strategies.

And I think it's interesting because especially in the NBA level, I think we see such fragmentation. Where I'd say even when, you know, some departments like sports science, they're naturally inherently more evidence-based, but there's still not theory like ecological dynamics underpinning what they do for sure.

So, you know, why is it just as applicable to coaching? And maybe this leads into some of our ideas of transforming for a unified organizational approach.

Yeah, I think it's got to be that, right? Because, all right, let's look at the— let's talk about what we just talked about, right? Like reductionism and decomposing it into its constituent parts, right? Yes, it's okay. Like the heart does what the heart does, right?

Uh, your liver does what your liver does, but they all are interconnected in this way that comprises an entire system, right? An entire organization of systems, so to speak, but they must work together in some way, shape, or form. You have to do that too at the coaching level and organizational level, right?

Because if you're siloing off these different things, then you may be developing at a rate where another arm of your company or your organization isn't, right? So what do you think that the part that hasn't developed to that degree is going to accelerate just by virtue of you being good at your particular area?

No, that's never ever the case. Right. So to me, you kind of have to have this unified approach. And I think there's a big divide between coaches and practitioners and sports scientists and academics, because most of the sports scientists Or, and/or academics couldn't theoretically walk the walk.

They didn't play the game. You know, they didn't make it to the level that the coach or the practitioner did. Right. And that's, I kind of get, you know, why someone would maybe balk at that. Right. Like, hey man, I've been doing this for decades.

I'm also really good at what I'm doing. Look, you know, I'm the head coach of Duke, or I'm, you know, traveling the world with a national team or doing these particular things. I totally get why you would kind of ruffle your feathers at that.

But I think what gets discounted is the work that's been done on the other side. I think it's really easy to think that academics and sports scientists just picked up a book, read something and thought, oh, that's neat. I can do that. That works here.

So-and-so, like most people who even get to that level and are afforded the opportunity to even talk about this or apply this in theory, in practice, they've done the work too. You know, it's Hard work is hard work wherever you're doing it. You know, there's jobs I have had that I feel like other people wouldn't be as good at.

And I feel like there's jobs people, my friends have had that I'm not as good at, but that doesn't mean that like you can't get good or be better in other areas if you don't have like a unified approach or really think about how does this apply to us as a whole, instead of me individually as a coach or me individually as a GM or as a strength or conditioning coach or things like that.

I think part of it too comes down to kind of how these things have been traditionally separated. So a coach is on a different like contract incentive than maybe a GM, right? And strength and conditioning people, they may get cleaned out when the coach goes, or they may not, you know, there's a lot of turnover.

I don't think there's a lot of different timelines being operated on. And I think those end up clashing with each other because you have conflicting interests. If you have a GM who's in the hot seat, He's going to take a bigger swing at a draft pick or going to do whatever kind of trade to make any kind of shakeup happen, right?

Knowing that he may get fired. Well, the coach may be a younger, more developmental coach who is operating on a longer timescale, right? And if these aren't unified in any type of way, then you're going to have organizational culture issues, you know? So that's why I think like at least having a theory as to why you're operating the way you're operating.

Yeah.

goes a long way because it helps people get on the same page, right? Like you and I don't have the same education background, but we have a shared theory. We're in alignment. You know what I mean? It's much easier to jump on a call and know what each other are talking about when I'm not having, or you're not having to do an entire semantics download, you know, or anything like that.

So I think there's a lot of things working there, but the main point is like having a theory in general. is going to set you up for success other than just doing it because that's the experience you've had, right? You talk about path dependency as a major issue, and I think that, I think that's an incredible point.

That's why we're waiting for the days an NBA team decides to operate on an ecological dynamics rationale. Whenever, if it happens.

But so we'll see.

Yeah, we'll see. Anyway, last question I've got, Gray, and see if we can wrap up with this. Like a lot of people have misconstrue the CLA as like a generic tag game, and that's not what it is. And they, they say, you know, CLA might be good for like rec kids or whatever, but not for NBA, WNBA pros.

Could you just summarize for us why that's definitely not the case?

Yeah. One, I think it is a stunted perspective of what development is. I think a lot of people have an idea that professional athletes As soon as they're drafted, you've got yourself a developed, you know, a fully developed product. And really whatever happens is based off that athlete's determination to be the best or anything like that.

A lot of onus is really kind of put on the athlete. And we don't talk about the situation that someone may be drafted to or put in that may have affected, you know, their career or different things like that. Right. So I get really, really annoyed.

with the idea that it's for kids or just for kids. The reason it works so well with kids, because it's easier for them to buy into, right? They don't have decades of life experience.

Baggage of traditional coaching.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They don't have all of this experience of, well, I've gotten it done this, this particular way. So this is what's going to work for me. You know, it's just like, it's easier for kids to learn a language when they're younger.

It's easier for them to just buy into it. They're more open, right? I constantly think of, well, what if we did that with these 20, 22-year-old, you know, kids, you know, who are coming into the league who aren't fully developed, who— one example I think of is Chet Holmgren this year.

Okay. He's had— and I'm biased. I'm a big Oklahoma City fan, but he's having an incredible rookie year. I think he benefited quite a bit from his injury year, his redshirt year. He got a full glimpse of what an NBA year is like, right?

He got to kind of get acclimated and develop in that particular way. Whereas maybe doing that and his rookie year of basketball at the same time, we may not have seen the same kind of results, right? He has a different expectation. He was open to learning and doing these different things.

So like, that's just an example of someone whose development could be drastically changed based off small tweaks in their scenarios. And it's not just when they come into the league. You look at someone like Al Horford. Look at his shot chart compared to when he came into the league.

I mean, it is drastically different. And that's, you know, how you last in the league as a non-star player is you become adaptable. You change, you develop, you have to do these things. Right. And so we see this all the time, but we always credit the individual and their determination, and which it is a large part of the time, given, you know, the dominant approach and different things like that.

But really what's going on is like a lot of these guys have been put into situations that have afforded them the opportunity to develop, right? We see players all the time that were supposed to be the next big thing that may not have had that opportunity, or maybe they didn't click with them and it didn't.

But if you're not looking at development as continuous and growth as continuous, and that's not linear, I'm not saying it's linear, but I'm saying it's constantly happening. And at timescales we could never ever even guess about, right? Sometimes things just click for someone real quick, right?

Like sometimes it looks like, you know, somebody who's really, really developed in this skill over the summer and they're able to implement it immediately. And then sometimes you're begging for a player to just add this one piece of their game and they don't do it till 10 years in.

It's not that people weren't telling them to do that. It's what was the environment like? What were the developmental opportunities like?

Great. Huge thanks. I think that's an amazing way to wrap up. I'm really excited that coaches, practitioners will be able to hear more from you in blogs, YouTube videos. Yeah, lots of Transforming content over the next months, years. So thanks again for taking time to join the podcast.

Of course, man. Thank you for having me on. Appreciate it.

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