Sunday, June 4, 2023

Basketball: Best Practices

“Best practices” vary. How do you value process versus outcome? One area high school won consecutive state basketball championships. Their best player hails from far out of area and the coach has assembled a 'regional' all-star team. That’s becoming the trend not the exception. Talent aggregators earn notoriety as coaches. 

Find paths to better practices using all available resources. 

Own "practice accountability" over "outcome accountability." Outcomes are subject to a myriad of variables - talent, schedule, health, even luck. But coaches control tryouts, player selection and development, strategy, scouting, game planning, and so forth.

Ideally, teams enter the post-season having evolved with cohesive consistency and 'toughness'. 

Process and outcome link nonlinearly. An “iceberg effect" exists as the visible performance in high stakes games links to talent and "unseen hours". 

Adam Grant writes, “Focusing on results might be good for short-term performance, but it can be an obstacle to long-term learning.” Soft scheduling doesn’t produce hardened competitors. Growth of young players may propel them past older teammates.

What is the best metric to measure coaching at developmental and high school levels? Here are just a few:

  • "Basketball experience"
  • Wins and losses
  • Player and family satisfaction (feedback metric?)
  • Player development 
  • "Peak performance" of top players 

“The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” Unreliable players tend to remain unreliable. 

Excellent coaches put the team first. In 1986, Dave Stapleton usually replaced Bill Buckner defensively late in games. Bill Buckner’s critical error in the World Series occurred because the manager deviated from his process of defensive substitution. Eighteen more years passed before the Red Sox won their first title in eighty-six years.

Lagniappe. Great culture is best practice.  

Lagniappe 2.  

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