Team Development and Training
Now that you have a better idea of all four concepts, you can focus on developing them in training sessions as a coach/educator to help develop your team and help them develop to become better and more aware players.
You can adjust or manipulate primary rules during activities in training sessions to focus on developing a specific concept in your players.
For example, if you assess that your team’s decision-making is lacking, you can change the primary rules and reduce the time players have to make decisions in a drill. EG – reduce the shot-clock in a 5v5 scrimmage activity in training.
You could add primary rules to activities in training that makes players on your team have to think and develop their strategy and tactics. For example, you could have a maximum dribble or pass limit in a 3v3 scrimmage, to make players come up with a strategy on how to get the best shot with the limited amount of dribbles and passes, and tactically adapt to the dribble limit. On defense, you would think about how you can manipulate the minimum dribble and pass rule to your advantage, to make the offense takes disadvantageous shots, etc.
These are just examples of how you can tweak Primary Rules to focus on developing specific concepts for your team, depending on what your learning focus is.
Individual Player Development and Training
You can also apply the 4 concepts to help improve the development of individual players as a coach, or focus on your own individual development as a player. Remember, all four concepts will impact players’ performance during games, so the more we focus on developing players’ understanding in these 4 concepts, the more complete of a basketball player they can be.
For example, you could have a player (or be a player) who is very skilled at dribbling and passing and can tactically adapt well to gameplay, but despite this, not get as many assists or create as many open passes for teammates as you’d expect. You could assess this players’ performance and see they’re lacking in their communication and concentration, as they’re not identifying the cues of players being open, and decision-making, as they don’t make the right pass at the right time. Or you could have a player who might be proficient in Strategy and Tactics, Decision-Making and Communication and Concentration, but has limited movement skill that needs to be developed.
It depends on how you assess your players’, or your own performance, and what you find to be an area that you need to focus on developing further.
(Jalen Green is a player with elite movement skill but could potentially score even more points or get more assists if he improved his Decision-Making or Strategy and Tactics.)
(Ben Simmons may have been highly developed in most of the concepts, but his limited movement skill acquisition in shooting the ball has hampered his development.)
We can do the same thing for individual player development as we did for team development, and design activities and adjust their primary rules to focus on developing a specific concept, this time for individual players to help them develop into better players.
At elite levels of Basketball such as College and the NBA, we see many examples of players improving their development similarly – Players improving their decision-making on offense so they take better shots and make less turnovers, to become more efficient and effective basketball players on offense. Players improving their ability to adapt tactically so they can play better under pressure. Players improving their ability to identify cues to improve their defensive awareness, etc.
(Julius Randle won the most improved player in the NBA in 2020-21, improving his Movement skill execution, Decision-Making and ability to adapt tactically in his Strategy and Tactics).
These are all examples and suggestions to help give you inspiration if you have players on a team that you want to develop or you’re a player yourself wanting to develop, but you don’t know what to focus on developing, or don’t know how to focus developing the 4 concepts in your players.
