Basketball Player Development

Stephen Curry grew up shooting on his grandfather's court. In David Fleming's ESPN feature "The Full Circle", which Transcending Basketball draws on, the rim was thick steel with no margin for error: only shots through the middle went in. The backboard was unpredictable, and the court was perpetually muddy, its surface full of rocks and tire tracks.

Alex's book suggests that court may have contributed to Curry's famously high arc. It tells a similar story about Kyrie Irving: on the All the Smoke podcast, Iman Shumpert described the rim Irving grew up on, with pieces missing from the backboard, as one explanation for the strange angles Irving finishes from.

Nobody designed either of those environments, but every player you coach arrives with a skill set shaped by where and how they played. Bernstein's line, which the book borrows, is that "skills have a history", and player development starts by finding out what that history is.

Transcending Basketball calls these influences forms of life: the values, traditions and behaviors that shape how players play and coaches coach in a particular place. Martí Cañellas described them on EP50 as "invisible backpacks" every athlete carries. The book's position is that you can't understand a player without considering their form of life.

The research it leans on comes mostly from outside basketball. Luiz Uehara and colleagues studied pelada, the pick-up football played in Brazil's streets, beaches and backyards. One player recalled playing every day from age six with one rule, no blood no foul. Another explained that if he bumped into a 15-year-old he'd get hurt, so he had to look over his shoulder all the time and anticipate moves to avoid contact. Avoiding the tackle became the constraint that shaped deceptive play.

Mark O'Sullivan, Vladislav Bespomoshchnov and Clifford Mallett did the same kind of work on Pavel Datsyuk, the NHL's "Magic Man". Growing up in the Soviet Union, Datsyuk played in felt boots with a rubber ball, so opponents couldn't stop quickly and fakes worked. Sticks were scarce and slow to replace, so he never learned a slap shot, which risked breaking his. He told the researchers he was "even a little happy" about that, since the wrist shot is so valuable in modern ice hockey.

Dr. Alex Lascu made the same point on EP8: you're never talking to a player in isolation.

The practical question the book asks is whether a staff can value what a player brings. Its example is an Argentinean player who throws one-handed, no-look passes to teammates others don't see. Does the staff build on that, or tell the player to "perform the fundamentals" and pass off two feet? Grayson Boucher, the streetball player known as "The Professor", couldn't make his high school team in Oregon because his coach didn't value his ball manipulation. On the AND1 circuit, the same player flourished.

Once you know the player, the next job is to find their rate limiters. Alex's keynote on the subject defines a rate limiter as a factor shrinking the affordance landscape, the set of opportunities a player can act on, in a particular context. On EP101 he gave the working version:

It's either an affordance the player isn't perceiving, or one they perceive but can't yet act on. "Needs to get better at shooting" or "ball handling isn't good enough" don't count; Alex calls that kind of thing generic and says it doesn't mean anything. The keynote groups rate limiters by where they come from: the individual (intention, attention, action capabilities), the task (boundaries, opponents, time, types of offense and defense) and the environment (safety in exploration, role identification).

Alex's first book, Transforming Basketball, adds where they come from: a shortfall in action capabilities such as flexibility, speed or strength, or a player not perceiving attractive affordances, or both. It also points out that a rate limiter doesn't have to be something bad. For a good shooter averaging 36% from three, getting to 39% may be the most important thing for that player and their role on the team.

On the same episode Alex read several straight from the database he kept at College Prep in Italy. They show how specific the language gets:

How to Spot Them

Alex had no analytics at all until he reached the NBA, so at College Prep everything came from watching film, and he believes the rate limiters they identified were accurate. At the NBA level, tracking data like Second Spectrum can point straight at a rate limiter, but he says you still need a deep dive into why the number is what it is, and that step is often missing. For youth coaches his advice is to skip box scores, use film, find three rate limiters per player, keep them in a shared sheet and review them every month.

How Many, and Which First

Alex works on three at a time. Players should take those three into games as intentions, and be able to tell you what they are and how they're trending. To choose the three at the professional level, he links rate limiters to upcoming opponents. If four teams this month switch a lot in pick and roll, pick-and-roll offense against the switch moves up the list. At youth level the question is what matters most for this player in five years.

The Six Phases

Transforming Basketball sets the process out as a player development framework in six phases. Staff cycle between them over different timescales rather than working through them once in order.

1. Identify the rate limiters most relevant to the player's development.
2. Build a case with supporting material such as film and data, and look for the cause: missing action capabilities, a lack of attunement to affordances, or both.
3. Design a variety of activities that target the rate limiter.
4. Observe the changes over time, and manipulate the constraints again in response to the new behaviors.
5. Report back to the head coach, because fixing the rate limiter may change how the player is used within the team's principles of play.
6. Identify new rate limiters as they appear, and prioritize them around the schedule and the team's needs.

A player development plan (PDP) is where the rate limiters live. Alex's view on EP101 is that you tell players what they are and show them you're tracking them. Professional players are smart, and simply knowing can help. At College Prep, staff sat down with players and presented the PDPs to them. George Vaz's article on co-designing player development describes the same two-way conversation, with the player helping to name their own rate limiters, strengths and role.

The PDP format in Transforming Basketball, shaped by Sefu Bernard, Mike MacKay and Ashley Cookson, sorts a player's game into three groups. Anchors are the player's greatest strengths. Building blocks are things they already do well but could do even more skillfully. Growth areas are the pervasive rate limiters that need the most time and attention. The plan also records the player's action capabilities, the forms of life that may explain their tendencies, how a rate limiter could be disguised within the team's principles of play until it's overcome, and a filmed history of the activities used.

Transcending Basketball adds an organizational point through Karamvir Gill, an NBA athletic performance coach who has worked with RJ Barrett and Canada's men's national team. Plans tend to get split by department: a shooting plan, a weight-room plan, a treatment-room plan. Gill argues for the opposite.

In that model, medical and performance staff help design on-court activities with the coaches, and everyone is working on the same few problems. Kareem Kalil's series The Human Development Playbook for Sport includes a piece on PDPs that goes beyond the end-of-season exit interview.

On EP12, Alex laid out ten takeaways for player development. The first was that it isn't about breaking down moves. Any move you see in a game emerged from the constraints of that moment, a player solving a problem against a particular defender, so drilling the move without the defender strips out the information that produced it. Coaches over the summer kept asking him how he'd teach a Eurostep.

His setup: the player starts close to the basket and runs at the rim, he passes from the smile and defends with two steps but stays live. Players find several variations of the Eurostep instead of one rehearsed pattern. That's repetition without repetition: the same problem, a different solution each rep. Two-Step Defender uses the same idea:

For a specific rate limiter, Alex sketched an activity live on EP101 for a player who struggles going left. He draws activities on paper first because it helps him be creative.

You can also hit two rate limiters at once. Alex's example combines going left with creating advantages against drop coverage: a 1-on-2 plus 1 where the defense always sends the handler left, the screener sets the screen but can't score, and the handler has five seconds to take a pull-up three or get all the way to the smile.

The Routledge book Alex co-wrote works through a youth version. A player whose anchor is ball handling (good change of direction and speed to get by a defender) drives into the paint, the help defender reacts, and the result is a heavily contested shot. Two rate limiters come out of that one possession: passing solutions once both feet are in the paint, and shot selection. If the player can't yet get the ball to the weak-side corner, a teammate in the dunker spot is a more attractive affordance, so the game puts one there.

Individualize Inside a Small Group

Another of Alex's EP12 takeaways: a global, positionless player still learns in an individual way. In a group of four, one player might start a small-sided game from one situation and another from a different one, because one needs to finish with a defender tight on their hip and the other needs better kick-out passes. The work still happens with teammates and opponents, because they're the information sources the solutions emerge from.

Alex opens the player development chapter of Transforming Basketball with the problem:

A development session is wasted on things the team will never ask the player to do. Alex's example on EP101 is the contested fadeaway isolation: a shot his coaches in Italy never practiced, yet one you'll see players drilling in workouts all over social media. The head coach would be unhappy if a role player started taking it in games. Player development, he says, has to be reverse-engineered from the head coach's vision, whether or not you agree with it.

Transcending Basketball traces the problem to structure. In the NBA and WNBA, each roster player is commonly assigned to one assistant for development and film, which deepens the silos. Gill lists other examples:

• Conditioning and running separate from "skill" work
• Working joint range of motion and biomechanics in the treatment room
• Force plates and vertical-jump training
• Player development plans organized by department instead of rate limiter
• Practice plans split into 20/20/20 silos of film, court and weight room

Alex's answer at College Prep was to do most of the development himself as head coach while delegating plenty of coaching, so his staff learned the principles of play quickly. Transforming Basketball gives a worked example of the joined-up version. An assistant coach sees a player struggling to finish against taller help defenders and starting to turn down drives. Analytics confirms it, and shows the player finishes better when rejecting the pick and roll. The rate limiter goes on the PDP, the athletic performance staff look at power, vertical and lateral movement, and the coaches design constrained 1-on-1s and 1-on-2s, especially out of transition. Chapter 7 of the book goes further and proposes a director of methodology to link coaching, performance, analytics and the front office around one theoretical framework.

Transcending Basketball notes that the Cleveland Cavaliers were the first NBA team to openly embrace the constraints-led approach. Alex was an assistant coach and director of player development there before becoming head coach of the WNBA's Portland Fire. On EP101, recorded during his time in Cleveland, he was asked whether young players adapt to this kind of practice. His answer was that it makes no difference whether he's running an activity with Donovan Mitchell, Evan Mobley and Darius Garland or with 12-year-olds at the Roseto camp in Italy.

What changes is the scaling and the messaging. To get buy-in, he suggests showing a player six of their own shots from the last game: a different spot every time, the pass from a different distance, the defender arriving from a different angle. Then ask how that fits what you're doing in practice. He also uses MAYA, "most advanced yet acceptable". He admits trying different-sized balls with one player too early; they didn't like it. They loved contested shooting games, which he counted as an enormous win over spot shooting. By the time of the episode, his players were changing range on every shot and moving around the floor in a nonlinear way without being reminded.

Player development is tied up with talent identification, and both are worse at prediction than most programs assume. On EP8, Dr. Lascu described Australian talent searches ahead of the Brisbane 2032 Olympics, and how long it took to convince a diving program to admit someone who excelled on every skill test but was one centimeter too tall. Her summary of the research: we're really bad at predicting. Alex added an example from his time with Paris Basketball: David Holston, a 5-foot-6 American point guard who was one of the best imports in France.

Transcending Basketball makes a related point about free play and early specialization: a multisport upbringing expands a player's range of solutions, and the decline of informal play is one more reason organized practice should be representative of the game. As Alex puts it in the book:

For the learning science behind all of this, read our skill acquisition guide. For finishing-specific ideas, see the finishing guide and George Vaz's article on guided defense in player development.