Ethan Khoza explains why freestyling—unstructured, reactive ball-handling practice—is highly effective for translating practice into game performance. He advises players to practice in defined areas, vary pace and direction, prioritize creativity over rote repetition, and keep the ball in their hands frequently to improve comfort, adaptability, and problem-solving with the basketball.
Chapters
This kind of goes to my other thing too, which is freestyling. Freestyling can be something that is really, really beneficial because it allows you to work on again that movement we talked about. It allows you to work on being able to string different moves together, different patterns together. Because when you think about a game, nothing's planned out. When you're handling a ball, a lot of it is reactionary or anticipatory to what your defender is going to do. So you might not know, they might reach and you have to be able to quickly change hands and that might look different every single time. So if you're used to practicing in a way that's kind of random like that, it's a really, really beneficial thing for you when it comes to trans to translating. So a really easy way to do that when it comes to freestyling is just give yourself an area. Maybe you go in the paint and you're just practicing, just different things. Okay, I'm just going to work on. My goal is to get all throughout the paint here. I'm going to go for 20 seconds, just mixing up my moves, my pace, the direction that I'm going, whatever. Like that's a great way to do it. A super simple way to do it. Kind of like how we talked about earlier. You can go on the wing and just give yourself like a, I don't know, a six foot area and you work on, okay, freestyle at 20%. Boom, up to 80%. Now then I'm at 100. Okay, now I'm back there to 20. And you're working on changing up your pace, but also freestyling and stringing different things together. So again, when you get into a game and you're going to be forced to sometimes have to do things that are unplanned, you've already worked on that. So I big fan of freestyling. I think that's something that could be really, really helpful for players and something that we talk about. Drills is probably when we go just basic drills, I probably freestyle more than anything else, any other sort of drill because I just think it's the most translatable when it comes to. Okay, is this actually going to matter? Is it actually going to apply come game time? And I think that freestyling is a great thing for that as well. Also helps you again to become more creative so you're not in a box when a game comes. Because if you're a player who only does drills and everything is pre planned. Okay, I'm going to do 20 crossovers and 15 between the legs and then 15 behind the back and then 15 double crosses and then 15 between crosses. You're always going to be in a box because all you know is that move, right? You don't know how to be able to change that when needed and a freestyle allows you to be able to do that. So highly recommend when it comes to drills that's something that you do. But my whole point with this is with the third point is have the ball in your hands as much as possible. If you're just dribbling the ball all the time, you're going to become more creative, you're going to become a better problem solver, you're going to become just better with the ball and that's going to translate to you being better. So handle the ball as much as you can, freestyle as much as you can and as you do that you're going to notice yourself just becoming more comfortable handling the basketball.
