Monday, August 4, 2025

Basketball - “Above My Pay Grade”

The only way to advance our pay grade is to raise our performance, how we think, how we work, how we communicate.

Challenge ourselves to learn more, to reflect better on both individual and team performance. That means studying multiple aspects of performance.

  • Skill - player development 
  • Strategy - basketball IQ (reading, clinics, podcasts, video)
  • Physicality- strength, quickness, conditioning 
  • Psychology - mental toughness, resilience, mindset
How do you eat an elephant? “One bite at a time.”

Function at the higher pay grade. That means knowing the duties and responsibilities of our boss and sometimes our bosses' boss. That doesn't mean ignoring the Chain of Command.

As a medical student on clinical rotations, I pictured myself as the intern. As the intern, I visualized the team from the resident's viewpoint. As a senior resident, the model became, "how does the Attending Staff view this problem?" 

Raise your pay grade:
  • Ask better questions (What's the strategy here? Why does this work?)
  • What if? What if we inverted the press break with the frontcourt players bringing up the ball?
  • Study great teams, players, and coaches. What made Pete Newell, John McLendon, or Pat Summitt tick? How did Jordan dominate although shooting only 32.7% from three?
  • Find mentors. “Mentoring is the only shortcut to excellence.”
  • Carve out “thinking time.” 
  • Study situations. Great teams and players find ways to win.
  • Learn recovery. Players with better recovery after training and games - nutrition, hydration, sleep, muscle recovery, contrast therapy - have proven competitive edges.
  • Build better habits of time management and efficiency. The younger you craft great habits, the longer your edge, the more marginal gains and magic of compounding.
  • Learn to assemble disparate data into believable theories. Tom Heinsohn theorized that as defenses sold out to stop threes, basket cuts would gain more traction. 
  • Learn artificial intelligence. 
Listen to Yoda. “Do or do not there is no try.” 

Lagniappe. Hard-to-defend actions create higher points per possession chances and offenses at or near the top of the league. 
Lagniappe 2. Support our kids; don't live our lives through them. 

Lagniappe 3. "Be shot ready," we've told kids. "But I'll look funny." "You'll look worse on the bench."  

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