Some Thoughts on NBA Player Development

I wrote this piece last July right before the NBA draft, mainly for the purpose of my personal understanding of player development and the role it plays in a player’s evolution. I was looking back on some of the old pieces I had written and I thought there are some valuable nuggets here that make this worth posting. Enjoy!

I’ve often thought of player development as a black box because of how little I know about it, but I’m now realizing how big of an impact this “black box” has. It directly relates to the NBA draft: players have a confidence interval of possible outcomes, ranging from their ceiling (upside) to their floor (downside).

What determines where the player will land, within this confidence interval of possible outcomes? One factor is the fit the player has within the infrastructure of the team that drafts him, and where he stands in the team’s long-term and short-term plans. Another very key factor (and maybe the most important factor) is the team’s player development arm. The team’s ability in developing and polishing talent is a huge driver behind the performance of the players who they draft. Great player development machines (think San Antonio and Golden State) will develop their talent such that they extract all possible upside from the player (and more). Poor player development does the opposite: it shatters the confidence of the young player and depletes any possibility of them realizing their full potential (Sacramento).

Drilling even further, what makes up a good player development machine? One thing which is important to consider is how a team develops a player. For example, Brett Brown (a product of the Spurs coaching lineage) wanted to develop Nerlens Noel into a proficient midrange shooter, so that he could blossom into something similar to that of Tim Duncan. This contrasted what others saw him developing into a Tyson Chandler-type player, being a rim-runner who thrives in pick-and-roll type situations. There are multiple possible paths a young player goes down (for Noel it was either the Duncan path or the Chandler path): the path which is taken is largely a function of the philosophy of the coaching staff. There is no absolute good or bad path; what matters is how the path which the player is taken on fits within the situation they are in. Molding a player into a go-to scorer may not be the best path to take if they are on a team with multiple scoring weapons; in this case, developing a player into a three-and-D guy or a playmaker might be the better route to take (if the player is part of the team’s long term plans). Finding the signal in this, one factor behind the strength of a team’s player development machine is their situational awareness in choosing a path for a player which optimizes for their performance (given their role within their team and the niche they have to occupy). Simplifying even further, this factor can be defined as path selection (abbreviated as PS), where what matters is PS-team fit.

Examples? The Warriors developed Klay Thompson as a two-way guard, focusing on both his offensive and defensive skills. They could have molded him into an amazing isolation scorer (think Kobe or Harden), but they knew that path would come in conflict with the personnel which the Warriors already had (Stephen Curry). So, when it came to path selection and PS-team fit, they made the right choice. But just deciding which route to take the player on isn’t enough, as there are many shades of each color (a two-way sharpshooter can either be Klay Thompson or Trevor Ariza). The shade in which the player becomes is dependent on the execution of the player development machine in taking the player down the selected path. Just like John Doerr says with regard to startups, “Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.” Here, while path selection is the idea, the finished product which the player becomes is a result of the execution. And the execution facet is a function of the machine and its proficiency, not of the coaching philosophies associated. If a player’s peak is a finished product, the execution in molding that is a function of the assembly line which creates the finished product. Good assembly lines with strong processes will execute well, poor assembly lines with weak processes will falter. In many ways, the assembly line and processes which drive execution is not an independent property of the team’s player development arm, but rather a byproduct of the team’s overall culture.

Is it an oversimplification to say that a team’s ability to execute in player development is a function of their culture? While culture (and the values which drive it) is one input into the overall execution of player development objectives, another important input is the proficiency of the coaching staff when it comes to the skills they are trying to development. Coaches who are defensive gurus will likely be better at executing on developing players who are going down the defensive path because of their strong understanding of independent skills (built through training) can synthesize into a great defender. For example, Darren Erman, a former assistant coach for the Warriors, was someone who leveraged his defensive expertise to help players like Klay Thompson and Draymond Green blossom into the defensive stars that they are is today. As Connor Letourneau of the SF Chronicle has written, “Erman put Green, Klay Thompson and others through 45-minute defensive boot camps every Monday through Thursday. Drills were geared toward everything from powering through screens to sliding their feet.” These drills, which often the crux of player development and training, likely had a positive impact on the development of Thompson and Green, reflecting the defensive prowess of Erman.

From this brief research, we can see that player development comes down to three key things:

1. Path Selection
2. Culture
3. Specific Expertise

This is a far from a comprehensive list — looking forward to thinking through this further, especially as the 2022 NBA Draft rolls around!