I worked a lot of basketball camps in my early 20s. My favorite was the University of Oklahoma, which I skipped my last week of college before finals to work. I liked the camp because we drafted our teams. Winning camp games or championships was not the goal, but drafting teams made the camp more fun.
The camp started with each division (age group) divided into groups with each coach at his own basket. Groups went basket to basket for 15-20 minutes per basket, and coaches were allowed to use those minutes for any activity to evaluate the players. Most other baskets started with pregame layup drills, two-line shooting, and more. I played three-vs-three. I did not check their layup abilities or shooting techniques. I watched them play basketball. We scrimmaged the whole time in every group that came through my basket.
We drafted in a snaked order and I picked somewhere toward the middle (5th through 7th of 10). We won the camp championship. One player was clearly the most talented player, and he was drafted first or second. My point guard was arguably the second-best player, probably deserved the MVP because we won, and I drafted him in the second round.
I knew I could wait to the second round to pick him because point-guard skills are difficult to evaluate in a layup drill. He was small and unassuming. The group was incoming 8th or 9th graders, and there was a big discrepancy in height and early maturers. I figured nobody would notice the late-maturing point guard in unopposed drills, and I was right. My first round pick was picked around where he should have been, but my second and third picks were the steals because I drafted basketball players, not unopposed skill merchants. I ended up with three of the 10-12 best players in a draft with ten teams.
My fourth or fifth pick also played far above his selection rank because he was the type of relentless rebounder who is overlooked in drills. He was just productive, active, and a beast going for rebounds, something every coach wants, but how do you see that in unopposed layup and shooting drills? How do you know the slightly uncoordinated, inexperienced player missing some layups and avoiding his left hand is a beast?
Everyone knew my first pick was good. He was the type of long, athletic, decently-skilled player who typically dominates middle-school teams. He was not as good as the best player who was in the same mold, but he was definitely among the top five to eight players, most of whom were the similar player type: The tall driver and scorer.
The steals were the point guard and the rebounder. I would have drafted the point guard first overall. I knew he was the best basketball player. However, I also understood how other coaches viewed basketball and knew they would pick height and athleticism over him because they did not see his true skills. I imagine he was fine in drills; he probably made his layups and handled the ball well in dribbling drills, but these skills did not distinguish him from the others who had the advantage of height, length, and visible athleticism. He was a crafty, intelligent point guard who created shots and made the right decision on nearly every play. He could shoot off the pick-and-roll and finish over players in the paint. His skill was obvious once we played games. I was simply the only one who used my evaluation time to scrimmage instead of do drills.
I was reminded of camp because a coach posted about the importance of teaching players the three-player weave for high-school tryouts. As I acknowledged previously (above), preparing players for tryouts and their next coaches may be necessary, regardless of beliefs. However, basing selections on one’s ability to perform a drill is an easy way to misevaluate.
What’s the purpose of tryouts? The question seems self-obvious, but I am unsure if it is. Often, tryouts (recruiting, drafting) seem to recognize prior achievements as much as anything else. We cut the player who cannot do the three-player weave because he has less experience or less-formalized coaching or played for a zealot like me, not because he lacks potential, skill, or talent. The players who excel at the drill have played more organized basketball or played for better coaches, and making the team is their reward.
This is the wrong approach. I have written about this with regards to recruiting, and especially recruiting in women’s basketball before NIL when there were fewer professional opportunities for women. Signing the scholarship was often the goal, but the scholarship is the beginning, not the end. Making the team is viewed as the goal, but making the team is the beginning. We should be selecting (recruiting) players for the future, not rewarding the past.
An easy way to see the distinction is professional salaries. Professional players make the most money at the end of their careers, not at their peaks. Teams often end up paying players for past achievements, not their present or future performance. Stephen Curry made $10 million in 2014-15 when he was the MVP; he will make just under $60M next season. Is he six times the player now than he was during his first MVP season? No. The Warriors won, in part, because Curry was underpaid in his prime, allowing the Warriors to sign someone like Kevin Durant, but now are stuck because his salary (as a percentage of the salary cap; in absolute terms he remains underpaid) outpaces his impact. His current salary is a reward for the first half or so of his career when he was severely underpaid relative to performance.
Selecting or recruiting players based on past performance creates the same problems. Past performance predicts future performance, but not necessarily as players change levels, which is when players try out or are recruited/drafted. A city’s high-school player of the year is not necessarily the best college prospect, just as the NCAA player of the year is rarely the 1st Pick in the NBA Draft. Success at one level is not indicative of potential at the next level.
Tryouts for a freshmen basketball team should be about potential, not experience, and not a reward for middle-school achievements. This makes decisions difficult. I watched a high-school coach nearly cut a near seven-foot tall high-school freshman because of all the things he could not do (too skinny, not strong, bad rebounder, didn’t post up), but how many players have more potential than a seven-footer? Last year, when asked who on my U17 team I thought could play professionally, I mentioned our 13th or 14th best player because he was likely to grow to seven feet tall; he was growing into his body, new to the team, started late due to some minor injuries, etc., so he struggled competitively as a 16-year-old, but those struggles did not change his potential. The odds are in a seven-footers favor, even when he does not help win a game tomorrow. Should a coach keep the six-foot post who dominated middle-school basketball and likely would be effective as a freshmen or the near seven-footer who may not help win a freshmen basketball game, but who has legitimate college and professional potential?
The argument goes the other way too. The point guard on my camp team was overlooked because of his lack of height; he was average height for his age, but was short for the best players. The other coaches drafted the taller, more obvious basketball players. He was a late-maturer, and nothing stood out about him physically. However, his skills and his brain were on a higher level.
On the same team that almost cut the seven footer, I selected one of the shortest players despite his competitive disadvantages. He saw the game better than others, but he was overwhelmed by some teams’ size and athleticism. I selected him because I felt if he caught up physically, he would have a higher skill level and basketball intelligence than other players. He was a late maturer; should we cut players based solely on when they hit puberty or reach their growth spurts?
A few days of tryouts is a difficult time to evaluate and select players, just as watching a handful of games makes evaluating players to recruit difficult. Recruiting is easier because college basketball is clearly a competitive level: Coaches recruit to win games now, and potential is evaluated in terms of relatively short-term success.
High-school coaches, and especially freshmen coaches, have more to consider. Freshmen basketball is a developmental level. Winning games is not the dominant goal, but ultimately we judge coaches by their won-loss record. Should a freshmen coach select a player who may not reach his potential for three or even five years or the player who dominates the drills in tryouts because he largely finished puberty and is near adult size and physically mature? My best freshmen players competitively often were football players because they were bigger, faster, and stronger, but few played varsity basketball. As others caught up physically, they lost their advantages. A team filled with football players likely competes well as a freshmen basketball team, but what is the point if few develop into varsity players? Winning freshmen games?
Selecting teams is more than a reward for prior experience and should be based on more than immediate success, especially at the freshmen high-school level. The goal is not to make the job easy for the coach by selecting the most experienced players who know how to play already, but selecting those with the potential to play beyond the freshmen level, whether due to their outlier height, craftiness, basketball intelligence, or more. Coaches must balance between the players who are super-effective now because of size, athleticism, toughness, and more, which may not improve as they age, and those who have special qualities, but maybe cannot yet express those qualities yet competitively. Excelling in drills is one thing; the goal is to select future basketball players.
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