How To TRANSFORM Your Basketball Decision-Making By Yourself

You know what separates great players from everyone else? It's not just their skills, it's how fast and how well they can make decisions. The problem is that most players have no idea how to train this by themselves and that's why they stay stuck. Today I'm going to give you four ways to train your decision making. Even if you have no coach, no teammates and no games to play in, so that you can start to play smarter and more confident right now. Because here's the truth of it. You can spend hours working on your shooting, on your handles, on your finishing, but if you don't know when to use those skills, you'll always be inconsistent. You'll be second guessing yourself and you'll struggle to impact games. I've seen players completely transform their game just by fixing their decision making. So let's break down exactly how you can do this. No matter where you're training or who you have around you real quick. If you want to add six or eight points per game to your average, I have a free basketball IQ masterclass link down below. It's going to help you to score more points, create more consistently for yourself and for your teammates, and overall play with way more confidence and consistency. You're going to learn things that are going to help you to start scoring more points the next time you play. Completely free. Top link down below. The fastest way that you can improve your decision making without even touching a ball is by studying the best players in action, but not by doing it the way that most players do. Most players watch flashy highlights on Instagram or on TikTok or on YouTube. And while it's entertaining, a lot of it is useless for actually improving your own game. Now there's two ways that you can do this. And even by doing this for just 10 minutes a day, it's going to completely rewire how you see the game. The first thing you need to do is watch more full games. So go watch college games, NBA games, Euroleague games, WNBA games. If you're a high school player, the best thing for you to do is watch college basketball because it's the most similar to the high school level. That being said, you can also learn a ton by watching the NBA, NBA or watching Euroleague or watching the wnba because you're going to see the best players in the world. Now when you do this, your goal is to spot patterns. You want to pause, rewind and ask yourself questions when you see things that stand out. So why did they make that pass? Why didn't they shoot there? Why did they choose to drive. What was the defense doing that showed them that that was the right decision to make? And then as you start to notice different patterns, you're going to start to be able to anticipate and predict things before they even happen. And I can't tell you how powerful this is when you apply it to your own game. As you get great at this, the these same situations are going to start to pop up when you play, and you're going to be a step ahead of everybody else. And that's how you really transform your basketball iq. Now, the other way that you can do this is by watching game highlights of specific players. So identify a player who maybe play similar to you. Maybe they play the same position as you. Maybe play similar to Trae Young, or you play similar to Klay Thompson, you play similar to Desmond Bain. Identify a player who fits that mold. Easiest way to do it is go onto YouTube and look up that player. And then game highlights. And then the reason we want to do this is because when we watch season highlights of guys, generally we're going to see the extraordinary plays, the stuff that doesn't happen quite as often, maybe the stuff that's not as applicable to us. But when we watch just a random game highlight from, you know, a game against the Bucks in February, you're much more likely to see things that are going to be applicable to you. Now, when you watch these highlights, obsess over the details again, asking those questions, why did he make that decision? What was the defense doing to show him that? Was there anything that tipped him off that this was going to be open on this play? And then what you want to do is for all these situations, place yourself in there and think about, how would I react in this situation? How does this apply to me? A little later on in this video, I'm going to tell you exactly how to do that so that this becomes ten times more powerful. Now, this next one might be a little bit more uncomfortable because it forces you to see exactly what's holding you back. You want to watch yourself play as much as possible. Record every game you can, whether it's a school game, whether it's an AAU game. Even if you record yourself playing pickup. This is so powerful because so many things happen when you play that you don't even realize in the moment. I guarantee if you watch back your own film, you're going to see so many opportunities that you've missed on, just because in the moment you didn't see it, so you want to watch it back. Ask Yourself, different questions. Did I miss an open teammate? What was a better decision right there? What led to that turnover that I made? Was that shot the best option for me? Could I have done something different in that situation? That's how you develop a basketball IQ and a decision making ability that actually translates back into your own games, that you get in those situations again and you're way better. I promise you, this is an absolute cheat code for taking your game to the next level. I recently went back last week and watched some of my old high school games back and it was crazy how quickly I picked up on opportunities that I may have missed. Now, if your school or your team doesn't film games, best thing you can do is ask a parent, ask a friend to film it for you. Even if it's not the perfect angle, you'll learn a lot from it. So now that you know how to study decision making, let's talk about how you can create the situation that you want to improve. If you want to get better at a specific situation or scenario in games, you can't just hope that it shows up, you need to force it to. The best way you can do this is by what's called purposeful play. And you're going to make sure that anytime you're playing one on one, two on two, five on five, whatever, anything that is a meaningless game, so not a real game, but pickup, or like I said, one on one, two on two, you're going to pick a specific decision making scenario that you want to get better in and you're going to place yourself there as much as you possibly can. So let's say that you're an elite shooter, but you're not great at driving in the basket. So that's what you want to improve on when you're playing in these games. In these meaningless games, you want to place yourself in a position to drive as much as possible. That means that you might catch the ball in the wing and you're open for a three that you probably would make because it's what you're best at, but you pass that up in order to work on a drive, even though it might mean that you don't score in that possession. Maybe your team loses that game, maybe you lose in a one on one, but your goal is to put yourself in the situations you're trying to get better in so that you learn what works, what doesn't work, what was the right decision, what was the wrong decision. The best way you do that is by putting yourself in those purposeful play Situations. This could be anything. It could be making decisions out of the pick and roll. It could be working on attacking closeouts. It could be transition in every game or run that you play deliberately. Put yourself in that position to work on that as much as you possibly can. And forget if you look bad, forget if you win or you lose. That doesn't matter. All that matters is placing yourself in that position. You're not just playing to win here, you're playing to learn. And that means you're okay with looking bad, being uncomfortable, or not succeeding as much as you probably could. Every mistake is going to teach you what the right read actually is. And that learning is invaluable because you can learn a ton from watching film, but you're going to learn even more by actually being in those situations and learning from experience. Now, what if you don't even have any games to play in? Well, I've got an answer for that, and that's what we're going to talk about next. And this is something that most players never even think to do. Now, this last one sounds weird, but science proves that it's very effective. And I've seen players make huge jumps from this without even touching the court. And that's by using visualization. The science behind this is very simple. Your brain has what's called mirror neurons. And essentially what this is is that you can watch a situation or you can visualize a situation, and the neurons in your brain fire as if you were the one who's actually the one doing that thing. When you think about how you learn things growing up, you learn to walk because you looked around and saw other people walking. You learned how to run because you saw the people running. You learned how to jump, how to dance, how to do everything just by watching, observing, and then your brain firing those mirror neurons that you could then do that same thing. What this means is that mental reps can train your skills and your decision making, just like physical reps can. So if you build a habit of using visualization, it's incredibly powerful for training your skills and your decision making. Let's talk about how we can do this. What you're going to do is you're going to spend about five minutes doing this. You're going to pick three scenarios that you might be in. So let's say, for example, you're a great shooter. So maybe there is a play that you guys run where you come off a screen on the wing for a three. Maybe that's one of them. Maybe there's another situation where you come off that same screen, but this time the defender closes out and now you have to drive downhill. Maybe the third situation is like a drive and a kick out. Your teammate drives to you and kicks out to the wing and, and that's your third scenario. What you're going to do for each of these, that you're going to close your eyes, you're going to place yourself in that situation as if you were literally standing in your shoes on the court and you're going to run through different defensive reactions and what your decision is when you see it. This is incredibly powerful. You want to hear the squeaks of the shoes on the court, you want to hear the crowd, you want to hear your teammates, hear your coaches. You really want to place yourself in these scenarios. And if you spend two or three minutes on each scenario playing through the different options and what your decision is, this is about a five or ten minute process. But it's incredibly powerful for getting you reps at making the right decision in these different situations. And as you do this enough, when you finally face those situations in games, you're going to feel like you've been there a thousand times because you've mentally prepared yourself and you've given yourself those mental reps that are going to translate into you being successful when you're actually in real games. If you do all four of these consistently, watching film of great players, watching yourself back, purposeful play and visualization, your decision making is going to take a massive leap. Now if you want to take this to a whole new level, make sure you check out that free basketball Q Masterclass down below. It's going to help you to cement in these different techniques and habits. You're going to learn how to score more points more consistently, how to play with way more confidence, and you're going to be able to apply the things you learn the next time that you play. Completely free. Top link down below in description. Make sure you check that out. Appreciate you for watching. Talk soon. Peace.