Atul Gawande is a Boston surgeon and prolific writer, authoring The Checklist Manifesto, Better, and Being Mortal among other works. His books highlight the pursuit of excellence, which mimics what the luminaries and lesser lights in the basketball community strive for.
In Checklist Manifesto, he describes the use of checklists in aviation, construction, cooking, finance, and medicine. Why can't checklists help us?
First, we should recognize the symmetry of basketball - what we want to do offensively is what we want to prevent defensively. We want our best scorers to take the lions' share of the shots and defensively we want to take away our opponent's strength.
I've emphasized three areas offensively and defensively for my teams to improve:
Ball pressure - handle it with cutting and passing, apply it with assiduous defense.
Possession - take care of the basketball (reduce turnovers) leading to a quality shot and deny easy shots each possession (forced turnovers, deflections, charges taken all appear here). A game is nothing more than the sum of the individual possessions.
Rebounding - use position and toughness to get more than 75 percent of defensive rebounds. Use quickness and anticipation to get as many offensive rebounds as possible.
Has this had any results? With our last group, we improved our shooting percentage about twenty percent and decreased our turnover percentage by about thirty percent. When we measure (not as good as film-based statistics) important parameters, players become more accountable to those issues. We don't report player statistics individually but sometimes review them for the group.
Ideally, monitoring turnovers also defines how the ball was turned over - traveling, bad pass, bad receipt (e.g. not going to the ball), or as Doc Rivers reports "shot turnovers," horribly inefficient shots.
Emphasizing the quantitative (measured) impact of decisions and execution can help alter behavior, which is what education does at its core.
