The New MONEYBALL in Basketball? A Practical Guide to Skill Acquisition in Basketball

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast, and I'm your host, Alex Sarama.

This is the podcast where we help coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to create the ultimate resource to help make sense of how contemporary skill acquisition ideas can be applied within the basketball world.

Throughout the podcast, we'll unpack how an ecological dynamics framework alters our perspective If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, then this is the podcast for you.

So today's episode is going to be a very practical one where I outline my vision for player development of the future. And this is player development approach which is underpinned by contemporary skill acquisition ideas And, you know, many of the concepts which I've outlined on previous episodes of the podcast.

So player development and the skills training industry, I don't think there's ever been a time in world basketball where this field has been as popular. However, traditionally this field has not been impacted by evidence-based ideas. What we've seen a lot of is training with props and equipment in addition to a heavy focus on technique, replication, teaching moves, etc.

And I believe that player development, I really think it's the easiest kind of approach to start using a CLA. I think it's much easier to apply the CLA in player development settings than many people think. So this episode is going to follow kind of a process of sharing 10 practical ideas, which I've kind of taken from things I'm seeing a lot right now and current trends within the industry, So this episode is going to basically give you 10 practical takeaways, and these takeaways are gonna be based on some of the most kind of prolific trends

I'm currently observing in the basketball world, and simply how we can apply an ecological approach in these 10 kind of areas to improve player development. So what I'm gonna ask you to do is think about a word, or maybe a few words, that you would use to describe a skilled basketball player.

For me, I would use the word adaptive. And, you know, why did I get you to think of that? Well, think about traditional player development environments where very much a focus on moves without defense, blocked, kind of repetition of these particular patterns, et cetera.

How well do these environments prepare players to be adaptive? I would argue not much. So this is why, you know, it's really important that we think about if we want players to become more skillful and exhibit more skillful behaviors, well, it's on us as coaches to benefit from the empirical research and immediately apply it into our practices.

So firstly, we've got to move away from the idea that it's about moves breakdowns, and I want to outline just why it's a flawed kind of concept to approach player development through the lens of teaching moves Seeing moves that other players do and then breaking those down and teaching them.

So any move that we've seen in the game of basketball, any breakdown, that move emerged as a result of the player to solve a problem that was acting, that they were faced by in that specific moment. In other words, they were satisfying the interacting constraints, and I outlined those in episode 5 of the podcast.

And the movement response that emerged was highly specific and relative to that individual. So what that means is that what could be functional and effective for one player, it doesn't mean that it's gonna be as useful for another. In many instances, it could actually be ineffective or even dangerous and increasing the chance of producing an injury if they're moving in a very unnatural way.

So every move that we see, it's a result of players making decisions and acting upon a perceived affordance. That is why the movement is observable within the move or technique that emerges. So it's a problem when we remove, you know, the biggest thing which led to that move actually emerging within the environment, and we just focus on the action.

So what this means instead is it's not— I call it like a Pokémon approach where we're trying to give players as many different things as possible. It's not about that, but it's about creating environments. So within one specific environment that we use the CLA to create within a practice, there could be many different moves that emerge in it, and they're going to be different, and they're not going to be identical every time.

But that is exactly what we want, because the player is being presented with a situation where they have to problem solve and then move to act upon the constraints present within that particular moment. So think about creating environments Not teaching moves. And ultimately, at the end of the day, if some highly specific move doesn't materialize, such as crossover step, inverted lunge, or whatever it is, well, it probably isn't functional for the player.

So it's a really interesting task though, to go about it and just think about how you might create a situation where a move may emerge in a different way. And I have this a lot, something like a Euro stepper. Over the summer, a lot of coaches asked me, well, how would you teach a Eurostep?

And I say, I don't teach one. I let it develop. All it could be is a player starts close proximity to the basket. They start running to the rim. I'm the defender in the smile. I pass it to them. I run out with them and I have 2 steps, but I'm a live defender.

And naturally what we will see, we won't see the same Eurostep happening every time, but we'll see several different variations of the Eurostep emerge. And that is exactly what I'm getting at here with that first practical takeaway. So number 2, skills emerge within the backdrop of principles of play.

So many times what's happened is we've done these move breakdowns and we've confused skills for techniques, but then, you know, we focus on, you know, just repping these techniques out as opposed to understanding how movements emerge within the rich context of principles. And this could be a conceptual offense, a conceptual defense.

It could be coverage solutions within pick and roll. So for me, it's very important that we integrate these things and we don't just treat skills as techniques and we don't just line players up at the elbow and get them coming in a straight line and finishing because that's not how players finish in the game.

Players might have to create an advantage off a pick and roll. It might be spacing and another player is the primary advantage creator on their team and they have to be good at converting the advantage. So they've gotta find space off the ball and then catch it, read a closeout, and get into where they finish through that.

I think it's very important as player development coaches or skills trainers, we have to know principles of play. If we don't know things like coverage solutions and how players may be able to create an advantage against a switch, a drop, a show, et cetera, then naturally the player development environment we create is not gonna be as effective as what it could otherwise be.

Point number 3, there isn't any such thing as a micro skill. So, you know, I've seen this term being used a lot over the years in reference to very specific biomechanical positions where which must exist. And obviously, as I outlined on the first takeaway, what could be good for one player doesn't mean it's good for another.

And I think the biggest kind of research base which discounts why there's no such thing as a micro skill is just internal versus external feedback. And as soon as players start thinking about how to move and where to put their body, as the coach, we're not actually making them more skillful, even though that's our intention and we're well-intentioned.

We're actually making it harder to perform the skill by insisting that they, they have these musts. So, if players take these micro skills over into the game, we're actually not enabling better performance, but we're hindering performance. And, you know, coaches are well-intentioned and they're not doing this on purpose.

They genuinely believe these are important, but we gotta understand the research and understand why it's very damaging to be talking about things like this and present these things as musts, which must be present within certain techniques and movements. So this naturally kind of leads on to the fact that one of the hardest things to do as coaches is rejecting models and these kind of idealized techniques that we grew up with as players, we learned from other coaches, and accept that there are multiple ways to achieve task goals in basketball.

For instance, multiple ways to execute a pass, to reject the pick and roll, to finish against 2 defenders in tight space. So instead of one way that's constantly applied and adjusted, we just want the outcome of degeneracy. Play— there are multiple different movements that could be used to solve a task.

So that's what we need to foster within our player development. And the only way we can start using a CLA effectively is ditching these mental models. That was kind of when I first started doing this approach well a few years ago. The moment I kind of made headway was when I ditched these mental models.

I stopped trying to instruct and stop trying to look for things based on how they should emerge and what they should look like, and just be comfortable with players doing it in different ways. Now, if something isn't effective and it's not functional, of course we need to change that.

But the difference is we are not telling them how to do it. We're going create a situation where the player naturally changes their movement responses in a more natural way. And, you know, lots of solutions versus one solution is number 5, and that's basically degeneracy.

So what we need to look for is creating activities where there's not just one solution for the player within that practice task. There's lots of different solutions which could be done and which could appear within that. So this also extends to, you know, maybe instead of solely just working on finishing, there are opportunities To shoot, to pass, to keep the drill alive longer.

So gotta think about movement is a problem-solving activity with many different solutions available to the performer. And this comes to number 6. If we are using the CLA purposefully, we wanna focus more on exploration versus instruction. So I'll give you an example. If we are maybe wanting players to develop a floater, if we think that's important, it's not something personally I really spend time on because of my team's shot selection and what we drive to take.

But let's just imagine theoretically this is the case. Well, the traditional linearized approach would be the coach would define, develop knowledge about within the players by telling them what the floater should look like. For instance, you must have your hand parallel to the sky.

Maybe they even use an external cue, but still it's very specific. Have your fingers straight. We don't want to snap the wrist. We don't want backspin on the ball. And you know, the coach breaks down the move for a minute. Again, that's not conducive to motor learning and skill acquisition.

It's hindering performance. So again, Coaches are well-intentioned, and this isn't a knock on the player development industry, but we gotta understand the research. And we want players exploring different ways to shoot floaters versus being instructed on one way to do the floater. Because think about how many different ways a player could shoot a floater.

And if we believe we gotta teach every move, then it's an uphill battle. We're never gonna win it because it's common sense. Within a game, players do things they've never been taught anyway. So let's not believe that players must be taught it before they do it.

It's just, that's a— oh, it's not just with the science. But basic kind of logic within what we see in basketball performance. So we gotta create exploratory behaviors versus trying to get players repeating one kind of coach-demonstrated technique or following their instruction. Now, number 7 is the idea of developing a global player, but still within an individualized manner.

So I think we're well beyond the days of, you know, recognizing that the game is positionless and bigs cannot just be doing back-to-basket work. I think everyone understands that, but While we are now moving towards more organizations trying to develop global players, and what I mean by that is players who can obviously play within a positional system, we still have to consider how they're learning within an individualized manner.

So what I've observed is as this positional basketball has become more common over the last 10 years, I'm seeing a lot of one-size-fits-all approaches to player development where everyone is doing everything, being taught the same techniques, or maybe even in a games approach, doing the same kind of small-sided games.

We instead need to think about, yes, we need global players, but the game still at the highest levels, there are positions and players learning and development, it's very individualized. So we need highly individualized learning environments versus generic learning environments where everyone's treated the same.

So what this kind of looks like in context is within practice activities, let's get players doing different things. You know, one player might start a small-sided game out of one situation, but another might start the game, the same game in a different setting.

Based on what they need within their player development plan, and the constraints could be different. Maybe a player needs more affordances to finish with a defender tightly pressuring their hip compared to another player who needs to improve their kick-out passes. So even if we have a player development group of 4 players, we have to think deeply about how we can create opportunities for these things to be met even within a small group session versus just adopting a generic kind of one-size-fits-all rationale.

And this really connects nicely with number 8. And for me, we cannot create an effective player development environment unless we've identified the rate limiters that are relevant to every single player. And all these are elements which are preventing players from becoming more functional, more skillful in certain areas of the game.

So it could be their lack of attunement to a particular affordance. For instance, when maybe they're a handler in pick and roll, and frequently within the game, teammates are open due to tags or overhelp, and the The player doesn't perceive those open teammates.

So that's a rate limiter preventing them from being more skillful. Or maybe when they reject pick and rolls, they get the ball stolen frequently, or they're not very good reading help after they reject and they go and kind of out of speed downhill.

So now we gotta think, okay, how can we create an environment where the player can learn to reject in different ways, self-organize in a different manner? So easiest kind of way to do this is identify rate limiters, maybe think about 2 or 3 relative to your players, and now we can go about targeting those.

Through the CLA and maybe some differential learning too, if it's something related to movement and self-organization. And number 9 is a really easy one. We want environments which feature repetition without repetition as opposed to rep after rep. So that's a very distinguishing factor because if players are doing the same thing over and over again, we just know that it's not conducive to learning.

Even information processing theory and skill acquisition from 50 years ago It was even spoken about then that blocked versus random and all those things. And while that's somewhat irrelevant in an ecological approach, if we really want to create alive practice environments and we want to harness variability, we need rep without rep.

We cannot have predetermined outcomes where players know exactly what they're going to do because nothing in basketball is pre-planned. And the last one is developing attunement. And what that is, is sensitivity to the affordance landscape. So the different opportunities for action, how the players are interacting with their environment.

And the only way we can develop this is obviously practicing with defenders in well-designed, creative, small-sided games where we can amplify these different affordances based on the rate limiters that are specific to every player's player development plan. So, you know, this is kind of my vision for the future, and Everything we're sharing at Transforming Basketball is really trying to get away from this siloed approach to player development, which, you know, where players are doing these isolation moves and doing things very differently to how they actually play on their team.

But also looking at the holistic side in terms of how to deliver a good program. Everyone's gotta be at the same table. The head coach, the player development coaches, the athletic performance coach, even the physio, the analysts. We have to be on the same table.

And how we obviously do that is using the same theoretical framework of a CLA informed by an ecological dynamics approach. So if you have any ABCs, any agree, builds, or challenges based on the ideas I shared within this podcast, as always, please reach out on social media.

Thanks for listening.

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