Kevin Durant and NBA Draft Combine Tests

The below combines three articles about the NBA Pre-Draft Combine written before 2013. Consequently, the references are old. I only combined and edited for brevity; I did not change the content or references, other than referencing a few recent studies.

As you read about prodigious performances in the NBA pre-draft combine, remember Kevin Durant’s performance ranked 78th out of 80 in 2007. Durant famously failed to lift 185 lbs. a single time, nor excel in any other test. Of course, none of the 77 better athletes won the 2008 NBA Rookie of the Year, and Durant is the only three-time NBA scoring champ from the 2007 NBA Draft. While other 2007 NBA draft picks trained to be workout warriors, Durant prepared to dominate the actual NBA.

Basketball is not the amalgamation of tests or qualities. Performing better in isolated tests does not transfer to on-court performance. Increasing one’s vertical jump or box agility test score does not improve basketball performance, although trainers and NBA decision-makers (apparently) believe performance on isolated tests predicts on-court performance (Berger & Daumann, 2021).

Fake Fundamentals

Combine performances offer little predictive information about future NBA performances, as illustrated by Durant. Players with better combine results tend to get drafted earlier, but with no justification based on post-draft performances (Berger & Daumann, 2021). Drafted players outperform un-drafted players in height, wingspan, vertical jump height and reach, line agility, and three-quarter court sprint tests, but do not necessarily perform better once drafted (Cui et al., 2019). The greatest correlation between combine results and rookie-season performance was between upper-body strength and rebounds and blocked shots (Ranisavljev et al., 2021). Anthropometrics, including height without shoes, standing reach, weight, wingspan, and hand length, were the tests most associated with future on-court performance (Teramoto et al., 2018). Standard measurements have predictive value; athletic tests not so much.

Basketball is not played in isolation. Basketball is an open skill; these tests are closed skills. Closed skills are unchanging and self-paced: Players initiate their movement when performing their VJ tests. They react to an external stimulus, generally the ball or an opponent or both, when jumping in a game. These are different skills. A player with a higher max VJ has the potential to jump higher in relation to the ball or opponents, but not when he reacts slowly or is affected by movement or contact. How many jumps in a game start from a static position with a self-initiated countermovement? Is maximum height as important as jump quickness?

Nobody who has watched Durant play basketball questions his athleticism. I imagine Durant excelled in the basketball portion of pre-draft workouts, as his shot is effortless, and he proved to be an expert shooter at the University of Texas. However, his more important skill is his ability to read the defense to create openings to use his effortless release. How does one measure this ability when competing against cones in workouts?

Evaluating players in individual workouts is like evaluating baseball players against the pitching machine. How much can you learn about a hitter in a batting cage? Batters must read the pitcher and determine the pitch type and location in tenths of a second. The speed and general location do not change in a batting cage. There is no decision-making, as every pitch is a strike, and there is no consequence for swinging at a bad pitch or swinging and missing. How does a scout evaluate a hitter’s ability to read a pitch or hit a slider?

The pre-draft workouts are like the batting cage because experienced trainers prepare players for specific tests, and there is no decision-making. The workouts are designed to make players look good, not to challenge players or expose weaknesses. Players practice for the specific drills. They are the designated shooter; they know they are shooting every time they run around a cone and catch a pass. Are these shots testing the same skill as receiving a pass in a game with a defender closing out and a teammate calling for the ball as the shot clock ticks down on a team trailing by two?

I attended the Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group Conference, founded by Art Horne, now the Head Athletic Trainer and Director of Performance for the Boston Celtics. Former Oakland A’s and current N.C. State strength and conditioning coach Bob Alejo spoke and mentioned he hired Brett Brungardt, who runs the NBA pre-draft combine, to test his players. He showed the Box Agility Test (also called the Lane-line Agility Test), and said NBA scouts had told him they can determine a good defensive player based on the first two steps.

I looked up the Box Agility Test scores for the players who were named 1st or 2nd Team All-Defense this season. The Draft Express database had scores for five of the ten players:

• Tony Allen (2004) – 10.70 seconds

• Chris Paul (2005) – 11.09 s

• Michael Conley Jr. (2007) – 11.63 s

• Joakim Noah (2007) – 11.79 s

• Tyson Chandler (2001) – 12.13 s

For perspective, the top three scores are:

• Mustapha Farrakhan (2011) – 8.18 s

• Isaiah Thomas (2011) - 8.22 s

• Andrew Gouldelock (2011) - 8.23 s

The two best scores for players over 6’8 in bare feet in the database are:

• Ralph Sampson (2011) – 9.12 s

• Josh Harrellson (2011) – 9.20 s.

For more perspective, I found players with similar times who are not all-defensive performers:

• Tony Allen (10.70): Chuck Hayes 10.70, Shawn Williams 10.69

• Chris Paul (11.09): Ronald Dupree 11.09, Michael Beasley 11.06

• Michael Conley Jr. (11.63): Trevor Ariza 11.63, Nick Collison 11.62

• Joakim Noah (11.79): Terrence Ross 11.78, Lonny Baxter 11.77

• Tyson Chandler ( 12.13): Monta Ellis 12.13, Mark Madsen 12.12

Some aspect of being a great defender is not measured in the Box Agility Test. The test has two primary problems: (1) It does not test agility; and (2) there is no coupling of perception and action.

I have not found reliability or validity information for the Box Agility Test. An unpublished thesis found the test to be reliable, but compared it to the T-Test to establish validity (Brown, 2012). The T-Test has been shown to measure speed, not agility (Pauole et al., 2000). Therefore, the positive relationship between the Box Agility Test and T-Test does not prove validity for the Box Agility Test as a measure of agility.

Agility lacks a precise definition (Holmberg, 2009; Jeffreys, 2011; Sheppard & Young, 2006). Agility has been defined as the ability to change directions efficiently or with a minimal loss of control or speed (Barnes et al., 2007; Safaric & Bird, 2011); described as a rapid, whole-body change of direction or speed in response to a stimulus (Sheppard & Young, 2011); and described as the coupling of deceleration with a reactive acceleration (Plisk, 2000).

More recently, agility has been divided into two categories: Reactive agility, or agility, and planned agility, or change of direction speed (Oliver & Meyers, 2009; Safaric & Bird, 2011). Planned agility involves a closed skill in which movements are known ahead of time (Oliver & Meyers, 2009). Reactive agility is an open skill capturing the perceptual and decision-making skills required within a game (Jeffreys, 2011; Serpell et al., 2011). Most tests of agility use pre-planned movements and apply the test results to open-skill sports, which is the case with the Box Agility Test. Actual agility, or reactive agility, is rarely tested because a reliable test is more difficult to design and repeat.

Basketball involves more than physical quickness. The best defenders anticipate. Was Shane Battier (2001 – 10.95 s) a great defender because of foot speed or perceptual skills? The perceptual abilities thought to differentiate expert and non-expert players include pattern recognition and the ability to predict and anticipate an opponent’s behavior (Aglioti et al., 2008). These abilities are untested in a pre-planned test, but ultimately differentiate expert defenders.

Recently, tests using flashing lights to simulate a reactive condition have been introduced. The pre-draft combine now incorporates a test with flashing lights, according to Alejo. The question is whether or not these tests measure something different than pre-planned tests. A pre-planned test and a test with a flashing light were found to measure the same predominantly physical qualities, although times were slower with the flashing lights (Oliver & Meyers, 2009). In essence, the they were the same test with slightly different procedures. A flashing light (Fake Fundamentals) does not present the cues enabling a skilled performer to anticipate and move more quickly. Reactive agility tests must incorporate game-realistic simulations because expert performers are distinguished by predominantly domain-specific attributes (Abnernethy et al., 2005).

A pre-planned test and a reactive agility test using a video display were found to measure similar, but distinct abilities (Farrow et al., 2005). More importantly, the reactive test differentiated groups of low, intermediate, and high-skilled players. “The highly-skilled players’ ability to anticipate the intended pass direction, as evidenced by a negative decision-making time, allowed them to predict earlier their change of direction and hence complete the sprint component with greater speed. In comparison, the lesser-skilled group’s decision times indicated they waited until the passer presented all available information before initiating their change of direction,” (Farrow et al., 2005). The coupling of perception with action is crucial to performance (Serpell et al., 2011), and a light cue does not train this coupling, as basketball players do not respond to flashing lights during games.

The NBA combine uses a pre-planned test and a test with flashing lights with virtually no ability to discriminate elite and sub-elite defenders, whereas reactive agility tests using a live person or video screen discriminated elite and sub-elite players in netball (Farrow et al., 2005), Australian Rules Football (Young & Wiley, 2009), and rugby (Gabbett & Benton, 2009). Basketball defense goes beyond the physical: Every change of direction is made as a reaction to an external stimulus. These directional changes and movements are never pre-planned. The coupling of these perceptual abilities with the physical qualities creates a great defender.

There is a cottage industry of trainers who specialize in preparing players to look good and perform well in these planned workouts, which is filtering down to the college, high school, and youth levels because of the NBA’s influence. Private skill trainers run their own combines and invite scouts (or do their own rankings) because they prepare their players to perform well in the specific tests and drills. The specificity principle states one must practice the exact thing at which one wants to improve: Play basketball to improve at basketball or practice the box agility test to improve at the box agility test. Combines shift the focus of training, as players practice to improve performance on specific drills and tests, not their actual basketball performance. We assume improvement in the drills or the tests transfers to improved basketball performance because the tests are basketball-adjacent, but transfer is not guaranteed or even likely.

Individual Skill Development

Working out is not bad, but playing basketball is the best way to improve basketball performance because expert players possess the skill and athleticism to navigate constantly-changing game environments. The problem with workouts is the goal. We moved too far away from the game and celebrate athletic feats that may not transfer, while ignoring actual game performance. Individual practice and tests have a place, but these isolated combine tests and workouts have limited validity in terms of predicting or improving performance, as best illustrated by Durant.

References

Abernethy, B., Baker, J., & Côté, J. (2005). Transfer of pattern recall skills may contribute to the development of sport expertise. Applied Cognitive Psychology: The Official Journal of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 19(6), 705-18.

Aglioti, S.M., Cesari, P., Romani, M., & Urgesi, C. (2008). Action anticipation and motor resonance in elite basketball players. Nature Neuroscience, 11(9), 1109-16.

Barnes, J.L., Schilling, B.K., Falvo, M.J., Weiss, L.W., Creasy, A.K., & Fry, A.C. (2007). Relationship of jumping and agility performance in female volleyball athletes. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 21(4), 1192-96.

Berger, T. & Daumann, F. (2021). Jumping to conclusions–an analysis of the NBA Draft Combine athleticism data and its influence on managerial decision-making. Sport, Business and Management: An International Journal, 11(5), 515-534.

Brown, A.E. (2012). The reliability and validity of the lane agility test for collegiate basketball players (Doctoral dissertation).

Cui, Y., Liu, F., Bao, D., Liu, H., Zhang, S., & Gómez, M.Á. (2019). Key anthropometric and physical determinants for different playing positions during National Basketball Association draft combine test. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2359.

Farrow, D., Young, W., & Bruce, L. (2005). The development of a test of reactive agility for netball: A new methodology. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 8(1), 52-60.

Gabbett, T. & Benton, D. (2009). Reactive agility of rugby league players. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 12(1), 212-14.

Holmberg, P.M. (2009). Agility training for experienced athletes: A dynamical systems approach. Strength & Conditioning Journal, 31(5), 73-78.

Jeffreys, I. (2011). A task-based approach to developing context-specific agility. Strength & Conditioning Journal, 33(4), 52-59.

Oliver, J.L., & Meyers, R.W. (2009). Reliability and generality of measures of acceleration, planned agility, and reactive agility. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 4(3), 345-54.

Pauole, K., Madole, K., Garhammer, J., Lacourse, M., & Rozenek, R. (2000). Reliability and validity of the T-test as a measure of agility, leg power, and leg speed in college-aged men and women. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 14(4), 443-50.

Plisk, S.S. (2000). The angle on agility. Training & Conditioning, 10, 37-43.

Ranisavljev, I., Mandic, R., Cosic, M., Blagojevic, P., & Dopsaj, M. (2021). NBA pre-draft combine is the weak predictor of rookie basketball player’s performance. Journal of Human Sport and Exercise, 16(3), 493-502.

Safaric, A.J. & Bird, S.P. (2011). Agility drills for basketball: Review and practical applications. Journal of Australian Strength Conditioning, 4, 27–35.

Serpell, B.G., Young, W.B., & Ford, M. (2011). Are the perceptual and decision-making components of agility trainable? A preliminary investigation. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 25(5), 1240-48.

Sheppard, J.M., & Young, W.B. (2006). Agility literature review: Classifications, training and testing. Journal of Sports Sciences, 24(9), 919-32.

Sheppard, J.M., & Young, W.B. (2011). Training agility and change-of-direction speed (CODS). In Marco Cardinale, Robert Newton, Kazunori Nosaka (Eds.). Strength and Conditioning: Biological Principles and Practical Applications (pp. 363-376). Wiley-Blackwell.

Teramoto, M., Cross, C.L., Rieger, R.H., Maak, T.G., & Willick, S.E. (2018). Predictive validity of National Basketball Association draft combine on future performance. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 32(2), 396-408.

Young, W.B. & Willey, B. (2010). Analysis of a reactive agility field test. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 13(3), 376-78.