The realities of basketball development

“We have to teach our kids to play the right way.” — Kobe Bryant

Everyone agrees, but few define the right way.

Bryant said: “In America, it's a big problem for us because we're not teaching players how to play all-around basketball. That's why you have Pau and Marc [Gasol], and that's the reason why 90 percent of the Spurs' roster is European players, because they have more skill.”

This perception fuels much of the antipathy toward player development in the United States and was a driver of my first book: Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development as well as the genesis of the Playmakers League. Pau and Marc Gasol are arguably the best players in Spanish basketball history; Kobe compared them to teammates, like Nick Young, on his very bad (21-61) Los Angeles Lakers. We often fall into this trap when comparing basketball in the United States and Europe.

People use Nikola Jokic and Luka Doncic to demonstrate European basketball development, but rather than counter with Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, or another future NBA Hall of Famer, the reference point is an Insta meme of a random AAU player. We compare the European outliers, those who are several standards of deviations from the mean, to the bang average player in the United States.

Bryant continued: “I just think European players are just way more skillful.”

What is the right way to play? What is skillful?

The Gasol brothers were great, highly-skilled players. Marc Gasol was named 1st Team All-NBA in 2014-15 alongside Curry, James Harden, LeBron James, and Anthony Davis. Many dislike Harden’s game and question AD, but objectively, was Gasol more skilled than those four? Do they not play the right way? Is peak Gasol more skilled than peak AD?

People criticize Harden for his foul-baiting, step-back three-pointers, and over-dribbling, but praise Doncic for the same style of play. Harden’s lowest three-point and free-throw percentages through his age 23 season are higher than Luka’s highest three-point and free-throw percentages through his age 23 season. In nearly every category, Harden’s age 23 season was better than Doncic’s statistically, despite Harden being a late-bloomer and Doncic an early bloomer. Luka will continue to improve, as did Harden, who peaked in his age 28 and 29 seasons. However, to praise Luka after denigrating Harden’s peak is disingenuous and based on personal feelings, not basketball style or statistics.

Almost everything fits a normal bell curve. Our perceptions are altered because we see the outliers from Europe or Australia, whereas we see the good, bad, and ugly here. We imagine other places avoid the bad and the ugly because we do not see them, but everywhere has a bell curve: Some players, coaches, and clubs are great, most are average, and some are bad.

"AAU basketball," Bryant said. "Horrible, terrible AAU basketball. It's stupid. It doesn't teach our kids how to play the game at all… They don't know the fundamentals. It's stupid.”

We played the U16 National Team starting center in our U16 championship game last year. He was 6’9 with decent coordination for someone who has grown so quickly, although like most young, really tall players his reactions were slow. His team ran a dribble-drive-motion offense. He rarely touched the ball beyond offensive rebounds. Our tallest player was 6’5, but our best lineups featured a 6’3 player as our tallest player. We did not have a great matchup for the 6’9 player, but they did not feature him, and in some cases attempted to hide him.

Is this the right way to play? He is roughly the same age and height as Cooper Flagg, but Flagg plays like a young LeBron, despite growing up in the less-skillful USA and not learning the game the right way, whereas the player we played against would be like a rookie James Wiseman.

He likely is the best national team prospect in his age group and is one of two 16-year-olds on the U18 National Team this summer, but his club rarely used him. His team made the championship game; their system worked from a short-term, win-now perspective. Their U14 team played the same way, also finishing second, but featured twin guards who were great at penetrating.

The U16s best talent was a 6’9 post player. Why not feed him the ball? Why not use on-ball screens to get him in pick-and-roll situations? Why not play him as a trail in a five-out? He needed these skills to excel with the national team and to progress into men’s basketball. Would they have matched their success? Maybe, maybe not. They may have lost more games because he was not yet their best player, although he was their best talent. Maybe he would have improved more quickly if they had fed him the ball all season and dominated by season’s end, improving their odds to beat us in the championship game. We will never know.

A giant criticism of basketball coaches in the United States is taking tall players and putting them under the basket. We see Jokic, and assume it does not happen in Europe, but it does. Not everywhere, obviously, but it does not happen everywhere in the United States either. Even when I played, the tallest player in my class (6’7) was a shooting guard who was allergic to the paint. Durant and others demonstrate that not all tall players stand under the basket. The same successes and failures happen here and there; we simply magnify our failures and ignore our successes, while magnifying their successes and ignoring the unseen failures.

European NBA players are more skillful on average because there are fewer players and only the best make the NBA. There were 120 international players in the NBA on opening night of the 2022-23 season (out of 450 players); 58 from Europe. There are 52 players just from Kentucky and Duke! Canada (22) and Australia (10) were the most represented countries. The population of Europe is nearly twice that of the United States, and Europeans make up only 12% of the NBA, but people suggest Europeans develop players better than the United States. Canada’s population is one tenth of the USA, and they contribute 4% of the NBA; maybe we should examine Canadian player development? Of course, many Canadian players attend U.S. prep schools and play AAU, but somehow overcome the horrible, terrible AAU basketball.

Many in the United States point to perceived problems in skill development and argue for the necessity of individual skill trainers. I have heard many suggest Europeans work with skill trainers, which, in my experience is overstated or misunderstood. I never saw private trainers in Europe until recently; they may have existed, but their presence lagged far behind their presence here. Teams tended to have an assistant coach or player development coach who ran “skill practices”, often in the morning, and then the head coach ran the evening team practice. I have been in clubs where we had a special skill development group for the better young (U18) players, and another club hired me as part of a federation program to give talented young players additional training. This too has evolved as teams play more games and travel more for international competitions. Private trainers are now more visible and prominent.

Our club hired a private trainer to run skill sessions each week with each youth team. I spent my first month meeting with him, attempting to align our views on skill development, but he was rooted in Instagram videos. He called it my opinion when I quoted literal textbooks, but took the ramblings of Insta trainers as truths. Eventually, I took over his sessions with my teams because he spent 20% of our weekly practice time on Euro steps and jab crossovers.

I asked him to evaluate our players in our first meeting. He said shooting was the biggest weakness, followed by passing. I agreed. You might imagine a trainer who identified shooting and passing as the problems would do shooting drills. You would be wrong. Week by week, Ihe taught a single dribble move. His teaching and progressions were well-done and well-planned. They were logical and well-thought out. Each drill flowed into the next. However, how do you run a 90-minute session with players who need to improve shooting and not attempt a shot, not even a layup, in the first 55 minutes? He used one minute form shooting drills to break up his dribbling drills, much like a coach shooting free throws after a practice scrimmage.

Whether the goal is winning or skill development, 20% of weekly practice time spent on a single move without using the move against defense is suboptimal. I have criticized summer camps because camp after camp spent more time on jab steps and triple threats than shooting; then, the college team scrimmaged, and I did not see a single jab step in an hour scrimmage! A simple rule is to spend the most time on the things that happen the most!

Our trainer worked privately with one of our U18/men’s point guards. He was one of the team’s best talents, but the other players visibly did not like playing with him. I liked him from day one, but grew more and more frustrated with him as the season progressed, as he seemed more interested in performing his practiced moves than winning and playing the right way. He often had the advantage, especially in U18 games, against anyone he played against, but he spent so much time trying to make the specific move or finish that he made himself easier to defend.

Trying to make different moves was not a big negative, as few U18 games were competitive and our record was unimportant (we were fairly certain we’d be the two or three seed from about the first game). I was happy for guys to try new things, whether it was our 6’10 center handling the ball and shooting three-pointers or a 6’2 wing trying to dunk on a seven-footer in the half-court. There is a fine line between encouraging exploration and the exploration being a very specific move taught by your trainer seated in the front row, especially when it takes half of the shot clock to set up the move and nobody else touches the ball.

My biggest failure was not being able to get him to play within the team’s style. An isolation one-vs-one scorer has value, and these traits should be nourished, but they still need to fit with the team game, especially when one is clearly not the team’s best player.

Finding the balance between the individual moves from private training and the team game is not just a problem in the U.S. Instagram has changed the way players train worldwide, and probably not for the better. This may not affect the outliers in the U.S. or Europe, and may even enhance their opportunities, but the vast majority of players are not outliers. The 95% of players +/- the mean, the majority, must excel within a team. The players four deviations from the mean, the fraction of the top 1%, the outliers such as Curry, Luka, Harden, and more, have systems adjusted to their games — in a sense, they are the system, and their teammates must fit around them.

Finally, throughout the world, coaches almost everywhere question the player development systems within their own countries. I have inquired with coaches in Germany, Poland, and Portugal recently, and each one suggested various problems holding back coaching and development. A Lithuanian coach suggested the same. A friend in Serbia has lamented old school ways of thinking and an aversion to change. Everywhere, it seems, coaches, the media, and others in the game identify specific problems limiting or detracting from basketball in their own country, and they imagine everywhere else is different, better.

The problem with AAU is not AAU. The problem is players have no offseason; they move from the high school competitive season to the AAU competitive season. High schools play during the week, reducing practice time and focusing practices on game preparation. AAU teams often are limited in their practices because of finances, travel, and more. In many states, high-school programs run offseason practices concurrent with the AAU season, and AAU programs hold tryouts and practices before the high-school season crowns its champion. A single, extended season — whether high school or AAU — would alleviate many problems.

The U.S. system is not perfect, and I wish the NBA and USA Basketball were more engaged in improving the environment for all players (and coaches). However, is there a right way to play the game? Is there a single best way to develop youth players? Do we need to change the system to enhance the skills of the outliers? What about creating a better system for all players? What about finding ways to create a system for “as many as possible, for as long as possible in the best environment possible,” as Mark O’Sullivan has said repeatedly? Why is that not our ultimate goal regardless of what it means for the outliers?

Note: Most of this article was published previously on the Playmakers League blog.

Markazi, A. (2015). Kobe: Europe's players more skillful. ESPN.com, January 3.