NEXT LEVEL COACHING - GAME INTELLIGENCE...AGAIN

The NBA Draft is on tomorrow and I came across this article by US Sports writer Danny Chau focusing on the projected #1 pick Cade Cunningham, who although not blessed with super speed or athleticism, has impressed most with his ability to play a slower paced game based on game intelligence and skill performance over eye popping dunks.

In AFL circles we're talking Scott Pendlebury, David Mundy and even Marcus Bontempelli types who I think you'll agree won't be winning the half time sprint any time soon.

I posted a pretty big series on Game Intelligence back in January this year so this will rehash some of that but in vastly different terms and using different examples that might resonate more with some of you than my presentation of game intelligence did but remember this is based on basketball so some of the comments are basketball specific but I'll relate it footy where I can.

• From a game style point of view, the faster you play the more randomness occurs in the game which forces players to read and react faster and more often, putting game intelligence demands far in front of athleticism
• It doesn’t matter how athletic you are if you can’t recognise the underlying patterns in front of you within a small window of time
• The longer you can decipher the rapidly changing shape of the game, the longer you can stay on the ground without hurting the team so the ability to maintain concentration is also a huge assett to have
• Having "feel for the game" is the sum of a players pattern recognition, visual processing (especially in spatial recognition) and their processing speed and these 3 cognitive abilities come together to form an executive action that aims to solve a problem in the game
• Pattern recognition involves identifying a familiar situation, or formation, on the ground that triggers recollection of a similar experience, and that is then used as a template for your visual processing, which is the act of repeatedly updating information - delivered from the retina in your eye to the visual cortex in the back of the brain - about movement happening in your perceived surroundings and making a deduction based on the information gathered, making processing speed present as how quickly you can act upon the conclusion formed
• Processing can come in many forms such how quickly can I go from 1 option to another option to another  option + the ability in the moment to perform the right type of foot pass in bball (low/hard stabkick v sit it out in front of the player) which is recognising movement, placement, where teammates are and what their body language looks like
• Through motion we are constantly learning our own capacity to act within our surroundings and the only difference in sport is the parameters of what you have to play within which dictates the amount of time you have to act such as contested ground ball gather in congestion where you need to forst collect the ball cleanly under physical pressure, then look to see what passing options are available, are they in space, does it follow in line with our team's game model so other players can play off this action quickly and effectively, can you get the ball to them, can they receive under limited pressure etc, which takes a few secondss to literally read like just now, but in a game you have a split second to process all this information in real time
• When you understand how the brain and the probabilites around decision making work, at least at a theoretical level, you can really start to think about how you can manipulate that environment, how you can manipulate the decisions you make, and introduce new variables that would change those decisions in a way that spurs on development
• To encourage players to make better decisions and in a more efficient way have your midfeilders play key position where they have to react on everything that's happening in front of them but also give your key position players experience in congested stoppage situations so they can identify paterns of play of how and when the ball comes out of congestion that they can go back to when they go back to their original roles where both position switches create opportunites to work under different contexts and constraints
• Really skilled players are just seeing different things, picking up different information about the spacing/movement of players which allows them to make quick decisions in the moment
• Really good players are more attuned with what their teammates can do (called shared affordances) where I see an opening the same time that you do and we can both play off that far better than those who haven't seen it as fast as we have
• Can you influence a game with your mind and your skill set?
• Make the opposition adjust to you because the opposition can get calibrated to speed/playing styles etc and then get themselves in a comfort zone so by slowing things down to be far more effectively tactically, it can force the opposition to think for longer which wrecks havoc with their cohesion and that's when you can attack most effectively