5 Lessons From The NBA 2021 Pre Draft Process

This past Thursday was the 74th NBA Draft since the inception in 1947. We as an organization got to be a part of it from start to finish.

There was more weight this time around as covid restrictions have been lifted significantly since last year’s 2020 draft.

This means more time, more effort, and more pressure from all parties involved.

However, I wanted to take the time to list 5 quick lessons I learned from this process and how it related to what we do as professionals in our own careers.

1. You’re Never Truly Prepared

I’ve spent nearly $25,000 dollars on continuing education. This includes training, business, marketing, communications, masters certifications and everything else underneath the sun. All of these resources helped put me in a position to succeed. However, none of this prepared for dealing with organizations, agents, and the behind the scenes life of the NBA.

In your training or business, the same principle holds true. Experience is the greatest teacher and no certification will provide you with as much tangible feedback as working consistently with individuals in person.

You need sweat equity and career capital.

2. Throw All Your Preconceived Biases Out the Window

You know that PRI course you took, or that perfect spreadsheet you made for your clients? Throw it all away. When the stakes are extremely high, millions of dollars are on the line, and you’re dealing with the livelihood of agencies, families, and athletes - you need to solve problems constantly.

Travel for workouts every week.

Left knee pain.

Too much playing volume.

Not enough sleep.

Poor nutrition.

Aching achilles.

Not enough time to run a good assessment.

Two skill sessions a day.

These are a handful of the hundreds of small roadblocks we ran into. You must be able to dig deep into your tool box (Career Capital) to solve these problems.

How many times have you found yourself going back to the drawing board to try to solve problems your clients and athletes are experiencing?

I do, and consistently.

Preconceived knowledge helps a ton as it is the reference bank you refer to often. However, having a deeper understanding of what pathologies, pain points, and underlying chronic issues may exist takes some digging.

3. Career Capital is Your Only Lifeboat

Off the heels of reason 2 - All of the resources you consume in your career must be put to the test. How can you solve problems quickly if you don’t have years of (of the right experience) in the trenches helping people?

You must work very hard and long hours to gain valuable skills in this industry that actually get athletes and individuals results. This is why it's much better to be an inch wide and a mile deep. Over the last five years of my career I’ve specialized in health/rehab and speed. This is not to say I don’t possess knowledge in other areas - it’s simply what I’ve excelled in the most.

I’ve helped nearly thousands of individuals improve their health, get out of pain, and run faster. We have the data to prove it. Every single week we are solving these two problems with our athletes.

In regards to NBA Draft Prep, when an issue would arise, I was able to work well under pressure. I’ve seen the pain points, pathologies, and movement deficiencies thousands of times prior.

The key takeaway? You must work with people in person. You will never build true career capital by regurgitating your own interpretations of text books.

4. The Best Asset is Availability and Health

As I alluded to earlier, health is the best availability during the draft process. You can try to build new physical qualities to help prepare for the league, yet, you are also rehearsing for a test. You need to spend time getting the athletes ready for the test, staying healthy, and creating different environments in which they will still do well on said test (The NBA Combine).

We changed our company name to VH “Health and Performance” last year. Why? Because I TRULY believe keeping individuals healthy and readily available is number one.

Performance is subjective. A mom going grocery shopping and bringing the bags to and from the car is a hard task for some. That is performance.

An individual preparing for the NFL Combine - that is another performance based task. It’s all the same but the underlying physical quality to perform well? Health and availability.

How can we define health in a basketball player or team sport athletes?

A. Managing External Stressors 

We manage volume and tonnage here at VH. For all my basketball players we have a specific database for games, practices, and skill sessions played throughout the year. With over 200 basketball players trained, we’ve found that microdosing higher intensity training sessions and “health” sessions have helped tremendously.

A1 High Intensity Session

- More intensive based strength work. A heavy unilateral session, a max effort sprint or resisted sprint etc. Something that is higher intensity and lower in volume.

A2 Health Micro-dosed Session

- Restoring respiration strategies, gait mechanics, and overall quality of movement. Understanding that basketball players have extreme degrees of anterior pelvic tilt, counter nutated innominates, external rotation of both the ilium and femur, anterior compression of the serratus. Knowing this can help you find what is actually needed to help restore these orientations. True longevity and health is being able to display high performance repeatedly over time.

Here are some exercises we use:

i. Standing Kettlebell Hook planks: stack ribs over diaphragm

ii. Ipsilateral Single Leg Heel Bridge: posterior scoop and better engagement of proximal hamstring

iii. 90/90 Side Lying lIft and Reach: Obliques and takes pressure off spinal erectors

iv. 90/9 Seated Knee Roll: Better internal rotation with a stack torso/pelvis

If you want to see 20+ more exercises we use, enroll in our Free Flagship Course, the VH Speed and Performance System. Enroll Here.

B Structuring the Intensity of External Stress with Training

A game ranks the highest in regards to intensity, therefore, the next training session should be higher intensity if it’s within the same day. If the game is 2-3 days out, you should have a lower intensive based session. Skill sessions, practices can vary in intensity. I also ask the athletes how they feel and what they did at practice to dictate what will happen during a session.

5. Basketball Players Must Always “Be Ready”

In the modern era basketball has become a year around sport. There is no true off season until you make it to the NBA. Exposure camps, clinics, skill sessions, leagues, and the likes have created a consistent stressor year round. As a coach, you must find creative ways to mitigate stress, build constructive habits, and build/maintain existing physical qualities. This includes more strength based work, less volume, more intensive speed/power work, and tons of micro dosed as we call “health sessions.”

Too often I see the same prescriptions in regards to training basketball players on the internet. Now, a singular video or post/article is not a great sample size. I’m referring to the same principles being taught over and over again.

Not a lot of heavy strength training

Extensive plyometric work even in season

The list goes on and on.

I wrote another article: 3 Principles for Training Basketball Players Here

The private sector works very similarly. Your athletes (to an extent) must always be ready. You may only be training them for 2 weeks, 2 months or even a week. This is also dependent on your training/business model.

If possible, I suggest creating a business model that aligns with your training ideologies. This will be the greatest bang for your buck.

We utilize four - 13 week blocks here at Varsity House. This allows us to properly program and produce results. You can acclimate new athletes, build a base, and then properly program them throughout an entire 13 weeks.