How Do Basketball Players Develop Skill with Dr. Alex Lascu

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. Welcome back to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. Delighted to be joined by Dr.

Alex Lascu. Alex and I started talking about Skill Act last year when Alex was lecturing at the University of Canberra, and just, she really helped me understand a lot, you know, the complexity of these ideas by making such good sense of them. And I think Alex does an amazing job at this, and to the benefit of coaches to really bring these ideas to life and apply them in their own settings.

So Alex, thank you so much for joining us.

It is my absolute pleasure to be here.

We've got a really exciting project obviously in the works with Adam Omiecinski too. We can't reveal more on that, but I think we hopefully have more information to share for the basketball community in the not too distant future.

Super excited about that.

So Alex, first question then, in terms of a lot of coaches and practitioners in the basketball world are now becoming more familiar with the term skill acquisition. It can be a little bit misleading as a term, and still, you know, a lot of practitioners don't know what it is.

So for someone being exposed to this term for the first time, or trying to maybe explain it to a colleague, what is skill acquisition?

Ah, the quintessential question. I actually think the people who came up with the term skill acquisition probably regret it now because And now we undermine it every time somebody asks us. So we used to think that learning and development was this process of acquisition where we like would take something, we internalize it, we'd save it in our brains like a file on a computer, and then whenever we need to use it, we can download it.

But realistically, we've kind of changed the way that we approach what skill acquisition is, and we've kind of thrown out the thing that we acquire something. Instead, it's actually like this ongoing process of fitness, and I say that, you know, as fit-nest because we're actually learning how we as individuals fit within our environment through the tasks that we do.

And that's probably the biggest thing that people need to understand about skill acquisition before they can really start to run with it, that it's not something we can acquire. We can't just expose ourselves to something and eventually just by osmosis, like a textbook on top of your head trying to study for an exam.

That's not really how skill acquisition works. And so it is actually about interacting with our environments, and through that we learn different things and we're able to adapt to those environments and we fit a little better every single time.

Amazing. So a lot of coaches, when they hear about this, they wonder, you know, why do they need research, or why could research help them become, you know, more effective as a coach as opposed to just relying on Experiential knowledge. What would you say to that as a skill acquisition specialist?

I say that I only fell into skill acquisition because I was really curious and I wanted to be the best coach I could be. And I started to realize that like everything that we try, we try to do it systematically as coaches. Like we'll try a drill, see if it works, kind of mentally take notes about whether or not it's going the way we think it's going.

And if we want to do that on a bigger scale, if we want to do that over longer timescales, and when development starts to be really important, like when your talent pathways expect you to be able to do something and you only have a limited amount of time to do so.

I figured there's probably people smarter than me who've already tried this before, so why not go and see what they've done? And as I've become one of those people that other people come to and ask for help now, it's kind of funny to think that now I'm in a position to share what I think about a particular topic when I don't really see myself as further along than anyone else.

But I do think that we don't recognize the assumptions that we make a lot. And research is really good at bringing those to the surface and being like, like, okay, well, if you think those things are connected, prove it, and prove it in a systematic way that somebody else could follow even if they did or didn't make the assumptions that you did make too.

And I, I do think it's hard because like coaches who just go out there and do their thing every single day, it's very easy to think that you don't do something that's theory-based or science-based, but actually like you show up as a person every single time, and what— who you are and what you do is a systematic process when you do it for long enough.

So it's just about being really explicit about the assumptions that we make and then being able to use those to our advantage to maybe challenge ourselves to think differently or to actually follow a path that's been carved before. So you never feel like you're doing it alone.

I love that. So, you know, to prepare for the pod, I mean, I've read your newsletter and I recommend to all listening they subscribe to it and we have the link in the show notes, but there were just 2 kind of little segments I pulled out.

And I'm going to read the first one, Alex, and I'd love it if you could just maybe build on it and it makes sense of it for the coaches listening. Because it goes directly to what you just spoke about where, you know, applying more of an ecological approach, I think it's very challenging for coaches because of how different and it really challenges the path dependency that exists in the basketball world as to what an offense is supposed to look like, what a practice is supposed to look like, how feedback's delivered.

So this was the segment from your newsletter. I've had many conversations lately about what coaching looks like. In one context, I connected with a coach who was familiar with the lens I perceived the world through, ecological dynamics, and wanted to apply these concepts more in their practice, but felt they couldn't because they didn't look like a coach.

And this is something I'm getting a lot, Alex, from basketball coaches. So it really resonated. Could you speak a little bit more to that, please?

Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny hearing that back, 'cause I don't remember what I write at all. So I was like, ooh, what is this gonna be? Just like anyone listening along, I have no idea what I say in those newsletters anymore, 'cause I gave up writing systematically a long time But yeah, I think it's, um, it's really difficult to take, you know, we don't like the words hands-off approach, but by comparison, it does look a lot like you're not doing anything because you're not actually making as much noise.

And I've been speaking recently in my new role, in my new job, where I'm sort of like leading coach education and development about what good coaching looks like. And I think being the loudest person in the room, especially when you're in a, you know, a hall full of athletes.

is not necessarily a good coaching quality, and especially if you're dominating that conversation all of the time. And so when you are supposed to look a particular way, as you already sort of introduced, that assumption that this is how we've always done things, so that's how we expect things to look like, makes it really difficult to then follow a different path because you're not just changing who you are and what you're doing, you're actually swimming against the tide a lot of the times.

And I've written about this recently about like, it's so Tiring to constantly have to justify why you're doing a particular thing, because we don't necessarily give coaches the benefit of the doubt that they are adaptable, that they do learn from their mistakes, that they can actually experiment in a particular way and then consolidate what they've learned from that and continue to be a better coach.

Even when we run community courses here, I find it really interesting when I ask people, you know, when was the last time you just tried something as an adult? You're working with 10-year-olds. They're not going to know that it was an experiment. Like, you could tell them anything.

They're We'd be like, yes, sir, whatever you say. So like, realistically, why not just see how it goes? And it was just giving people that license of like, oh, so I am allowed to actually try things the same way I would have done as a kid when I did some ridiculous course that I'd made up in my head in the playground.

Why is that completely gone the second we kind of grow up? So I like to take the little everyday life moments that we've kind of let go of over the years and bring it back into the way that we see coaching, because I think there's so much value And actually just trying things.

And I don't think our systems are very kind to us when we do.

That's so good. I think what that links to, Alex, is a phrase I stole from you, attractors in coaching behavior. And, you know, coaches have these behaviors which are so normalized that they're not willing to try something new. Could you just explain that essence of an attractor in regards to coaching behaviors and maybe what coaches could do to be more intentional about this so that, you know, some different coaching behaviors may emerge?

Yeah. So we talk about attractors in the context of dynamic systems, which essentially means that every time we do a behavior, the more that we do it, the more ingrained it becomes. And the way that they've drawn it actually through computer systems is that it almost looks like a well that gets slightly deeper and deeper every time you do the thing.

And so as a coach, if you coach the exact same way every single day for years on end, that well starts to get deeper and deeper. And I think when we get too deep, at some point we're actually digging our own graves rather than digging a well that's going to lead to water.

And so to encourage people to get to a point where they're not necessarily just digging themselves down into the ground for no reason, the way that we can kind of spread those wells out is by actually experimenting beyond what we would normally do.

And it doesn't have to be much. It could literally just be like, oh, I really want to butt in here, but I'm not. I'm just going to wait 10 seconds. And see what happens. I'm going to count to 10, maybe the thing will resolve itself.

And that's just that one little step out of that well to then give you the space to grow again. Because if we only ever dig down in the same direction, it starts to get quite narrow and we don't necessarily get better or learn anything new because we're not exposing ourselves to opportunities to do so.

And so our goal is to not have like these series of behaviors that are just deep bores of concepts that we only know and stick to. We kind of want to be a little destabilized ourselves as coaches so that we give the freedom for other people to do so.

If your coach is someone who actually is encouraging themselves to learn, why wouldn't you go out there and learn as an athlete too? I'm inspired by that rather than thinking they must not know what they're on about because they just asked me a question and they're supposed to know the answer.

So yeah, just little, little innovations, little experiments. This is your license to do so.

I love it. And when you first kind of spoke to me about attractors and coaching behaviors, I linked it immediately to a phrase I think about 2 years ago where in warm-ups, when I didn't think carefully about warm-ups, I always was resorting to the same thing, which was like a dribble tag game where they're dribbling and had to touch the other opponent's knees.

Now obviously, you know, it's better than a warm-up doing dynamic stretches and things, but I found that I was so— when especially in a situation I hadn't had time to prepare for, like maybe I was just doing a new practice or a camp with kids I didn't know, I'd resort to that.

It's a simple example. Obviously, I think a lot of coaches have, you know, other attractors in terms of how they're giving feedback, you know, and just the lens they're using to view basketball. But it's, it's really interesting. I think just what I did was just, I basically for a year I was like, I'm not gonna do this activity again, or I'm just gonna do it in a completely different way.

And it just forces you to be aware of it.

So. I think that awareness is interesting. I just wanted to say really quickly, it's, we're not saying that having those behaviors that you resort to are bad. We're just saying that doing it unintentionally, which without actually like applying it for a particular reason, that's when we start to think, okay, I think I can do a little better than that here.

So it's not to say that you can't do the same warm-up every time. Absolutely. If people enjoy it, if it does exactly what you need in that moment, and you've intentionally applied it to be like, okay, this is exactly what I want to be able to do right now, that's perfectly fine.

But we want to encourage people to actually start thinking about those things and asking themselves that question, because the second you stop asking yourself Is this what I want to be doing right now? That's when you've probably fallen down a little too far the well.

I love it. That's a great build point. So this, this is a great segment to another piece I wanted to pull from another newsletter. And then we're going to shift to talent ID, Alex. So I think this is great because it links to a lot of the work Craig Morrison and Karl Woods have been speaking about with not knowing.

This is a conversation I had a lot with coaches recently where they feel like they have to know everything that's about to happen on the court. And they're trying to control their offense through that lens. And And that's why we still have such scripted offensive design in the basketball world because coaches aren't comfortable with that level of uncertainty.

And they feel like, especially in things like zone, when they see a defensive zone, they feel like the players are like chess pieces and they have to know the zone offense as to where players are gonna be. Whereas my approach is very different.

It's some principles of play, but anything could emerge and happen, you know, using some of those principles. So you wrote, if we stop to consider that each individual has their own direction, one that the right one is actually scaled to their uniqueness, not the sport they're playing or the skill they're developing, then we need to be okay with not knowing, with being uncertain.

And I think that's such a powerful phrase. And I just think especially for basketball coaches, understanding that could be huge. But it's not easy, right? Because admitting this and being okay with that uncertainty, it's not easy.

No way. And it's so uncomfortable, especially when you're in a context where you are expected to know something. And I think that's really hard to justify unless everybody in a system is on board, right? Nothing really ever happens in isolation. And so I've kind of learned over the years to give coaches like the benefit of the doubt because realistically a lot of their behaviors are just a function of the system that they're in, the way that they were coached.

I explain it like Avatar: The Last Airbender. Like, every coach is never, you know, the little boy that you have in front of you in Aang. It's actually like the reincarnation of every coach they've ever had in their lives as a person in front of you.

And so you have to kind of remember that. And every athlete is the same. They're a function of every parent conversation, peer conversation, school conversation that they've ever had. So you're never just individually talking to a person in isolation. We're really talking about interacting systems that we can barely understand because they are so complex.

And so I find it really hard when we use the words expect and should and like supposed to. And I actually made a conscious effort this year in particular to try and not use those words ever because it assumes that we know where the world is going.

We absolutely don't. Like, that is just something that we tell ourselves so we can fall asleep at night. And the second you start to realize that you actually don't need to be able to predict what is about to happen But you still need to be open enough to kind of respond to whatever is going to happen, then it's a complete change in lens and you start to see the world so differently as a result.

You really do. And I think this is really interesting because it links over to talent ID, this idea of not knowing. And so a big part of what I'm trying to do with Transforming Basketball is show how these ideas, it's not just confined to coaching, but every single part of a basketball organization at any level.

So I think it'd be really interesting to talk about how an ecological dynamics approach changes, you know, talent ID approaches. But before we get to Alex, I think talent is a word which is used frequently in basketball, but in a way which sometimes makes me cringe a little bit.

So what, you know, especially through an ecological lens, how can we actually reconceptualize what talent really is?

I think this is a question we've been pondering quite a bit and People much, much better than me have been asking some really tough questions about it. But whenever someone would ask me why talent development, because I started to realize that if I say that to someone who's not in sport, they're like, what even is that?

So it's so contextualized in sport and I had no idea. But to me, I defined talent as like this combination of adaptability and decision-making within an athlete. And so that kind of left it open enough so that we can consider them as a person who can do things that other people cannot do.

That's usually a whole of why someone is talented, but there were also things that you could get better at. And so I always thought that we like to use the word talent for things that we couldn't necessarily explain or justify. And so when we pick people into pathway programs and stuff like that, when I asked them, it was, this is part of my research, they couldn't tell me why at all.

Like they couldn't tell me why a pathway existed. What was the benefit of it? How do you move between the different phases, et cetera? So we were literally just picking on like gut feel, which I'm sure works for most of the time because you put people in an environment that supports them, they're probably going to thrive.

But what about everybody else? Why does everybody else not get the same opportunity to find out what their talent could be? And I think that's what annoyed me enough to do a PhD on it, was just, you know, what if we're actually defining it wrong and we're not taking into consideration the fact that the people who end up in these pathway systems, who end up getting contracted for sports, are usually just the people who happen fit better within that sport anyway.

And we've just thrown the kitchen sink at them and something has stuck.

Yeah, love that. So looking specifically in basketball, I think what we see a lot of in talent ID is a very kind of reductionist approach. And especially maybe with youth national teams and youth programs, things such as organizations profiling players just based on athletic capability.

And that's actually something I see a lot college basketball, where it was my biggest frustration in Italy. Players basically could not evaluate the players I had. And the reason why is because they had a flawed lens, I felt, to do that, because all they were doing was looking at things like quickness, speed, height, and they weren't actually looking at things such as dexterity, attunement.

And it was so frustrating. But before maybe we even get on that, could you just, you know, you did a really good paper, which we're going to include a link to. It was Beyond the Field of Play: Contrasting Deterministic and Probabilistic Approaches to Talent ID and development systems.

Could you just outline the difference between both those approaches to talent ID and what that means?

Yeah, and there's, I was really proud of this. So I made this little graphic to summarize it as well, which is available in the paper. And I think the biggest thing that it came across like 4 different factors, like 4 different subsections within the paper that were really easy to remember.

So the first one is actually giving sport back to the kids. And what this means is like we constantly have this like endless quest for like youth high performance. We have elite academies for 6-year-olds and football and ridiculous things like that where we professionalize this thing that was supposed to be fun.

So, uh, that's kind of like the deterministic approach to sport and kids' sport in particular. And on the other hand, what we wanted to try and convince people to do is actually use sport as a center for developing Their needs. Everybody has their own individual needs, and a lot of those things we don't get from professionalized versions of youth sports.

So even just the opportunity to enjoy backyard versions of things, again, taking the autonomy and problem solving that would normally happen in a street or a cul-de-sac or a local park and actually building them back into our sports systems. So if you don't have access to that sort of casual play that you would normally get in those smaller suburban areas, Then you can actually experience that when you do sign up for formal sport because we've taken the time to consider them.

So the first one being give sport back to the kids. It's not about being professional 10-year-olds, it's about playing. The second one is around an ethos of amateurism, which we've kind of talked about in the sense of like nobody is really ever going to be an expert because that kind of assumes that there is an end to the pathway and somebody is up here and everybody else is below them.

So A deterministic approach to this is about imposed behaviors, so telling people what to do, how to do it, prescribing patterns of play, having predetermined outcomes that actually we know contribute to dropout quite significantly. Nobody really wants to play a game where it's all been dictated by the coach before you get out there to play.

What's the point of showing up on the weekend if you're not even going to get to enjoy it? And of course, this is impacted by How we judge success, whether or not we value someone who's won an under-10s premiership as a coach versus how many kids sign up the next year.

I'm definitely leaning towards the latter, and I'm trying to institutionalize that in my new job, which is kind of fun. So making sure that we don't actually have premierships to win, we're actually just trying to see how many kids sign up again. And then on the flip side of that, we have, you know, experiential knowledge, exploration, collaboration, the things that we do when we admit that we don't know what to do next.

And trying to leverage that rather than hide away from it. If you lean into those sorts of things, then we can actually assess sport a different way. And we want to actually make sure we have an impact on as many people as possible, not just the select few that we deem worthy because they happen to be physically suited to a sport.

And then the last 2 are more around that sort of talent ID systems approach. You don't want to actually select as early as we normally do. I hated being in under-12s representative teams because I was literally just trying to work out how I was going to do my math.

Test on the week— the next week, and now I'm actually, you know, at trials to try and beat the children to make this team. The concept sounds ridiculous, but it's kind of just so embedded in what we do in sport. And of course, selection processes are usually influenced by birth and maturational advantages.

I was very tall as a 12-year-old and then didn't get any taller, like, and if they'd picked me based on that, it would have been an unwise investment. So I had to try and work out other things to do, and that was something I had to do myself because coaches didn't know what to do when you don't actually fit the mold of a sport anymore.

So by delaying those processes, we leave it open. People get to actually experiment with what they're good at, and then we actually promote well-being and participation. And that's how we engage with sport rather than sort of like making sure that we actually kick people out almost with the systems that we use because we make it so difficult to enjoy.

Yeah.

And then finally we have early diversification. Try and do as much as you can in so many different ways. A friend of mine, Cal Jones, uses this awesome mantra of any sport, anytime, anywhere. That's my goal in life is to be able to do that.

Oh, you're going to go play squash on the weekend? Well, I can do that. Bring me a racket and I could play that game because I've tried it once or I've been with my friends or something, anything. And we often find that the best athletes are usually the ones who are more than capable.

In multiple sports because they're actually just really good at adapting their body and making good decisions anyway.

Incredible insights there, Alex. So maybe looking now at basketball, because obviously it's a unique sport because I guess it's one where individual constraints can be favorable and, you know, such as height. But then what we've typically seen is a huge kind of overemphasis on action capabilities.

And the problem is, yes, that can be advantageous, but only if players are attuned to how they can use those to act on, you know, different affordances. So what I see a lot is national teams kind of making their selections at youth levels solely on things like height tests.

What would you say to that, especially with the, you know, research that you've been a part of?

Yeah. And I've got some amazing stories coming out of like talent drives and stuff that we're doing in Australia. So when the Brisbane '32 Olympics were announced, They decided that they were going to go on a talent drive for kids who would be over like Olympics age in 2032, which is usually like little children now.

And the thought of it just made me sick personally. I was like, I can't do that. But they've had some really interesting discussions around, okay, well, how do we work out like what are the things that we're looking for? What are the physical characteristics that allow us to predict?

Turns out we're really bad at predicting. We do have the statistics to prove that in research. But if we are going to use that approach anyway, because we're not going to be able to change the system that quickly. What do we do? And it took, I think it was weeks or something like that, to convince a diving squad to actually admit someone who absolutely excelled on all of the skill-based tests but was 1 centimeter too tall to be a teenage diver.

You've got to be kidding me. And so it became this process of, okay, let's just say we take a gamble on this person, we open it up, we include that person who's 1 centimeter too tall, We invest in them anyway and see what happens so that if they do succeed, we can then turn around and say, well, if you hadn't wasted all that money on the investment and just included them anyway, it would've been a much better process.

And so I think it's amazing that we are so tied to physical characteristics like that. Too tall, too short. Didn't they change the NBA minimum height as well? Like, isn't Steph Curry gonna be like the shortest person ever? 'Cause they're not planning on drafting anyone who's actually shorter than him.

I remember reading that and thinking, oh God, like, that's so unfortunate for all of the people who have worked out how to use that to their advantage. But I think it's just, it comes back to certainty, right? We can point to that person and be like, yep, you're tall, I can then teach you the rest, as if they're like this empty vessel who contribute absolutely nothing until a coach then decides to fill them up with the knowledge that they have.

And if we start to remove those assumptions that people come with nothing, That they're worthless without this talent pathway, that individually they contribute very little other than the birth characteristics that they were blessed with. I think we start to see what they're capable of and what we actually judge them on very differently.

That's so interesting. I was thinking last year in my experience working with Paris Basketball in France, we played a team, Dijon, and they had a 5'6 point guard, American point guard, David Holston. And I'd never seen in my life, especially at that level, a player that size.

And yeah, absolutely killed us. And one of the best, like, imports in France. And it's just amazing because how many people would've never given him a second look during his career.

Mm-hmm.

And the things he's attuned to and the things he can do, just some, you know, skillful behaviors. It's, it was incredible. And obviously, you know, we're not saying, obviously, Go pick a team of 10 5'6 players. I'm not saying that at all, right?

I don't want to be very clear, but I think it's just so important that coaches and talent evaluators such as front office staffs, they're just more aware that, you know, we can't just be picking players based on measurements and things of this nature.

And I do think, like, I was watching the FIBA tournament actually, and yeah, my favorite player without a doubt were the tiny Japanese players who would just sit there and, you know, toy with people. It looked like they honestly had them on strings like puppets.

And it was amazing to see because I knew that in countries like Australia, that would never ever happen. We would systematically drive those people out of a talent system because it'd be too hard to work with them when realistically they're probably gonna be the most responsive to those support structures, to good training sessions, to coaches that care.

Love it, Alex. So practically, I wanna look at maybe the, as we kind of wrap up the pod, looking at the implications of these ideas For maybe coaches or organizations in the youth space, and then the professional level too. So for the youth space, I guess, would we say the main implications would be as many as possible for as long as possible, and not running these elite things at under 12, selecting early and just keeping those kids in the system, and I guess constantly updating.

So always being open to taking kids in.

Yeah.

Later on, et cetera.

Yeah, exactly that. And I think it's really hard because it does mean that you have to pay attention a lot more. You have to be open to including people at later stages of their development. You have to kind of keep an eye on how people are progressing and the way that they interact with the sport so that you do actually get to the point where you could interchange quite quickly what your teams look like.

And that's a really big ask for systems as well, because we know that a lot of these talent pathways and stuff don't have Endless staff that can go out and scout everybody. I heard some, you know, crazy statistics about what it takes to actually scout for a Canadian team across the landscape or where their competitions happen at a youth level.

And you think, oh, well, no wonder you're sitting there looking at stats, because I would rather sit at home and look at an iPad than drive 5 hours to the game where they're actually playing. And so it means it's really hard because that means that you could be in the squad and then you could be out of the squad just as quickly and constantly in and out as well.

It makes it really difficult to know where you stand as an athlete. So the support structures and things we'd have to keep in place would have to be very different to justify that. But we wouldn't have so many of the health problems that globally face children.

I think one of the stats I saw recently was 860,000 girls are not playing football compared to boys because they don't think the sport's for them, or they've been, you know, in some way, shape, or form kicked out of the sport.

Like, just practically, obviously working with the London Lions Academy this year from scratch. We've done like no selection under 12. So it's just, you know, whoever comes. So trying to delay selection and it's the opposite to these football academies who are selecting so early.

But then you see, I think it was the stat from, I think it was Joe Baker. He was, he wrote in the book how, what, 97% of players in Premier League academies in the UK don't play a minute. And it's just a system.

Like, and it's so funny.

We're so attached.

So attached. And people in basketball always look to football and say, oh, football's been doing this, but it's like, Doesn't mean anything. I mean, so many— football is one of the most traditional sports. Just because it's got loads of money and resource, it doesn't mean these ideas are being applied, right?

Not in the slightest. Yeah.

And I guess not only just delaying selection. So under-14s is the first age group we've selected, but critically trying to have other venues so we can keep kids in the system and still get good coaching. And then also just We're always kind of, if there's a player who is a late developer, which I think we see a lot of in basketball, like being open enough and flexible to incorporate them in into the pathway.

So I guess then at the professional level, Alex, it's interesting because we've got quite a lot of front office staff members at different levels in professional basketball listening to the pod. What would you say the biggest implications are for them? Because obviously in North America, we have the draft system in the NBA.

Whereas international basketball, it's just, we don't have that. It's just, you know, general managers and clubs selecting players, signing them to contracts. But how could these ideas maybe make these members of staff think differently?

Yeah, I think it really questions what you look for. And I think the biggest thing, if we only had one thing to give to these people is no action happens in isolation. So I've been really focused on splitting the word interaction. So I almost, I write it almost consistently nowadays as inter-action.

To remind me that like everything is happening is interacting with something else. And so if I'm watching a game on the weekend and using that as the only sort of like criteria to decide whether or not this person is worthy of being in the selected team, then I need to think about all of the interactions that are happening to get this person there.

What are they going to do afterwards? How do they respond to feedback? How is the coach kind of influencing what's happening? Am I actually seeing this player play a game or am I watching them perform this, you know, predetermined chess play that has actually been written on a whiteboard and then dictated to them?

And am I actually considering that in the way that I'm assessing this person in front of me? And that does make the job increasingly difficult because, as it turns out, people are quite complex. So reducing them to the sorts of things that you can just see in a fleeting moment from the back of the stadium, I think it's just trying to open that up realistically as much as you can.

But logistically, that might not be much. Just thinking about, you know, how is this interacting? What else, how are they interacting with other people, with the pressure of the game, the stage of development that they're expected to be at at the moment, and then really considering what we can do with that information to better support this person, not just decide whether or not they're worth investing in.

No, that's amazing. I think just using an ecological lens, I think not only, I think it's tough because especially I'm just thinking in the NCAA where it's overwhelmingly so controlled. It must be so difficult for professional leagues to evaluate those players because they're running models of the game and they're not actually acting on natural things.

And then you basically have to unlock them, I think, when they get to a different environment and it's, if it's more conceptual. But then I think only if you're using this lens, I think you could really look and observe the players in a different way versus if you're just seeing it through a, maybe a traditional.

Yeah.

lens where you're focused very much on a certain, on things which have been emphasized for a long time in basketball. But then of course, not only if you use an ecological lens to identify players and then adopt in coaching practices to develop it, I think that's when you get a huge competitive advantage as a pro organization.

Yeah. And I do think it's really hard to expect that any change in training practices alone has an exponential effect on anything because realistically that's only one component. I like to use the metaphor of a Jenga tower. Like, I've just written this into a paper recently where like everything we change, every aspect of our practice is kind of this entire Jenga tower of blocks.

And it's our job as coach developers or people who work with coaches to kind of tap the tower and find the blocks that are actually ready to move before we then encourage them to do so. And then the coach has to be supported well enough to kind of take that block out and put it back on top in a different way so that they've evolved their practice.

And if we push that too hard, if we don't do it at the right moment, if we don't have a system that supports them, then we just end up kicking over the tower. So to expect that one change in training practice then results in this entire ecological system, it doesn't work like that.

It has to come from the entire system. Otherwise, and if we're not pulling in the same direction, then that coach is the one who takes the brunt of the force.

I'm worried that people will just see this like the CLA as a magic bullet, you know, just doing— yeah. And you just hit the nail on the head with that. It's, it's a great response. So Alex, I just wanna say thanks so much for joining the podcast today.

I'd say all the coaches listening, be sure to follow you. It's just @skill@lasku on Twitter. You are an amazing follow and I'm looking forward to many more conversations and podcast episodes over the next years.

Yeah. I mean, who knows where this is gonna go? Every chat is worthwhile.

So Alex, thank you so much. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you would like to learn more about the work we do, head to www.transformingbball.com to access our free resources and help spread these ideas throughout the basketball world.

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