What are you looking at?

The latest interesting question that has arisen from the last few practices has to do with the eyes, and what are you looking at and what you are looking for. Right now we are working a lot in practice on picks (ball screens) and the infinite number of reads that arise from these situations.

To quickly summarize what I've found with our team, we come off the pick with too narrow of a focus, and typically have our heads down looking at about a 6 foot square on the floor in front of us while we dribble to the basket. If one defender gets over to the help line, our players have the natural athleticism and the ball skills to be able to dish the ball off. What I don't think we are seeing is when a second defender sees the action and rotates to help the helper. So when that first defender comes over to help, we throw the ball as a reaction. Sometimes it's the right pass, sometimes it's not.

Right now I think it's just a matter of getting our eyes off the floor and scanning what defenders are doing (or planning to do, if you're playing at that next level higher.)

What becomes interesting is trying to figure out how the top level players read defenders when they come off the screen. Does Steve Nash go through a conscious rapid fire process of elimination of looking at defenders, and seeing who is helping and who is open when he comes off it, or does his take a quick mental snapshot of the situation and instinctually decide what to do? If you have read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, the second option will sound familiar to you. I think it's a combination of the two, a case of Nash being so good at analyzing picks (and having a ton of repetitions under his belt) that the process has become semi-automatic to him. Just like how your body's muscle memory lets you shoot a ball without thinking of every deatil involved, your mind makes a sort of "decision memory," for lack of a better term, that lets you automate much of the process. Sometimes you have to think about spreading your fingers when you practice your shot and I think sometimes you have allow a conscious thought into that automatic decision making process.

What we are trying to achieve with training decisions using a high number of reps is this automatic (or at least faster) processing by your brain. We train you to look at certain cues and be able to recognize them faster and faster so that you have "quicker decision-making". Call it muscle memory for your brain.