To successfully teach team skills, coaches need to work on each individual fundamental, not throw zillions of skills at players in one fell swoop through working on predetermined plays or plays with limited options. Break each team skill into its component individual skills and then break these down further into learnable, doable steps.When players are armed with individual skills they will learn team skills in minutes, rather than hours, days, weeks, or never.

Myth number two is that fundamentals are easy to teach and learn, and team skills are more difficult. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any grandmom could become expert in teaching team skills in weeks, whereas you need more knowledge of, and interest in, basketball to teach fundamentals.

Fundamentals are difficult to learn and players usually learn slowly, but they learn well if properly taught. We only need to look at the best players on earth in the NBA to see that when coaches neglect fundamentals, players do not improve shooting, foul shooting, dribbling, passing or boxing out. (Try to find an NBA player who can dribble without palming the ball.) As a result, the play in the NBA often looks like school-yard basketball.

Myth number three is that you can't teach many skills like shooting and dribbling. Coaches who regularly go the NCAA's tell me that. This is nonsense! However, in one sense they are correct: you can't teach what you don't know. Because teaching individual skills is very difficult, it has become almost traditional not to bother. These coaches realize they have never had success before, so why waste time. It's much easier to just work on team skills and repeat the mantra, "players either have it or not." My books and videos cover every skill that these coaches think unteachable.

Another myth is that the most skilled players are the best players. Unfortunately, you need more than skill to be a good player. An 80-year-old sharp shooter will not be effective in a game because he/she can't move fast enough. Conditioning, strength, quickness, and agility are additional requirements for a great basketball player. Skill only goes so far. And, most of a coach's practice should involve improving a player's athleticism--conditioning, agility, quickness and so on.

One more myth involves the importance of plays. When I started to study basketball, I found many books entirely devoted to offense, describing at least five zillion plays. Surely one of these must work well all the time! If the play works in practice why won't it work in a game!

Plays don't work because players need to react to the defense, not act like automated robots.To effectively react each player must properly execute basic skills like cutting, faking, coming to the ball, and more involved skills like communicating, looking, passing and so on. When skills are taught separately players, without the help of the coach, automatically synthesize them into an effective offense.

Another myth is that repetition yields improvement, practice makes perfect. In a way, this is correct. If you do something 100 times incorrectly, then you become expert in doing it wrong. To do things correctly and improve you most do it properly each time.
How is it that a player can make 40 foul shots in a row in practice and then shoot 20 out of 40 in a game? To understand the answer, one must know a little more about shooting.

Shooting success depends on improving technique, the mechanics of moving the body, the arms, wrists, fingers, etc. A player must develop proper technique, then practice to maintain this technique. Shooting 40 foul shots in a row does not develop or even help maintain technique. As a matter of fact, shooting 40 shots gets players in to a groove using technique that can not be reproduced another day. On game day this player uses a completely different technique thus leading to poor shooting.

There are a series of lessons that help develop technique. These are quite difficult to learn. One learned they need to be regularly practiced from one foot from the basket. Only when a player is ready should he/she practice from the foul line. And then only 2 shots in a row should be taken.