Detailing "Feel" and Cognitive Athleticism in Basketball

As I dive deeper into the scouting and player development realm, something remains a constant for me in critical thinking: What separates the great players?

Now, I don’t mean what separates them skill wise, I think that’s typically easier to pinpoint. You can see and understand the footwork to get to your left-handed fader in the post. You can see the hesitation move and stutter rips that have been grinded on in gym work to win in isolation. While you can’t necessarily put a number to a skill or attribute, it’s quantifiable in a sense. You can evaluate how good someone is at something using data, eye test, and combining multiple evals. But, what’s the intangible stuff that makes the best stars, best role players, best overall standout?

You hear “Feel for the game” constantly throughout basketball. As with anything, part of the difficulty in terminology in the game is that

1. There’s a lot of it!

2. Many people use the same words with different meanings.

3. Feel is incredibly broad for a four letter word.

This taps into the notion that effective communication is, bar none, the most important quality of a good team/organization, but that’s a different story. But it also taps into more of what I’m getting at: Feel for the game has a different meaning to almost anyone you talk to, which adds to that intangible air.

Two extremely high level coaches with decades of experience can have very different comprehensions of that quality and how they’d ascribe it to a player.

I really want to dive into this, because for one, it’s fascinating, but primarily because I really want to detail my own understanding and application of Feel.

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To start, I’d categorize feel for the game as what I’d dub cognitive athleticism. One of the things I struggle with a ton in the way basketball is talked about, players are broken down, and the way things get highlighted is a lack of complex understanding of decision-making. The name of the game in modern basketball is decision-making… with more possessions, faster pace, and an increased focus on efficiency, making the right decisions with the ball (and without it) is critical. 

The number one thing a player will do on the court every single game regardless of how many touches they do or don’t get is make decisions.

However, the struggle aspect I come down to is how decision-making gets reviewed in real time. You don’t “make” decisions in real time, they happen. While you’re certainly in control of your actions and reactions when you step onto the hardwood, in general there’s a massive undersell or recognition for how much of what happens on the court is reflexive/instinctive. Can you clean up decision-making and reflexes with buy-in and focused reps? Absolutely, but the point as well is that focus, awareness, reflexes… those are all things that conglomerate into that unquantifiable skill of Feel.

Why call it cognitive athleticism?

Athleticism is something you largely have, although environment and how you come up of course have a major impact on the type of athlete you become. We routinely see youth soccer players have a more advanced ability to see and read the court at higher ages in basketball, as it teaches you to read and scan wider areas. A football player will typically have a much more defined ability to play with explosiveness in short bursts. Someone who came up in dance or gymnastics is likely to have increased flexibility and functionality in multiple planes of motion (Barry Sanders!). 

You can work on athleticism, hone it, make subtle shifts, and trim the edges for marginal improvement, but by the time you’re an adult/pro, it’s much harder to just “get better” as an athlete barring some outlier circumstances (which we have a few of in the 2025 class). Your muscles and tendons aren’t just going to undo 20+ years of training, regimen, and physically imposed learning.

Similarly, I think the brain/reactive motor functions should be viewed in that kind of light. Much like in any area of life, the brain is so impacted by what happens during youth, and that’s huge in sport development. As mentioned prior in the soccer example, being exposed to different zones of vision and patterns on a field/court makes your brain work. Many of the preeminent playmakers of the game, those often attributed as high feel individuals, played soccer: Candace Parker, Chelsea Gray, Sue Bird, and Caitlin Clark all played soccer while coming up.

That’s not to say that soccer creates great playmakers/high feel players, but showcases the idea that training your brain different patterns and reads outside of basketball can boost those reads in basketball, or even open passing windows that others rarely see. Of course, so much else goes into this. How well can you handle the ball? Are you a good enough scorer to command a defense? Do you have good foot speed or acceleration?

But again, that’s why I feel we need to view this complex level of basketball/athletic understanding as athleticism. There’s certainly an element of “being born with it” that you can’t quantify, but when studying players who possess this intangible, you can see commonalities.

• Quick Processing: Reading things quickly, intaking information and adapting with minimal lag time, being able to do something proactively when recognizing a play/action on offense or defense.

• Field of Vision: I think focus often gets used for what I’d consider field of vision. Is there an aspect of focus being important? Without question, few can be successful pros without being focused on and off the court. But, here’s the point, players that routinely get taken out of a play by a flare screen, a pin down, anything away from front facing… that’s often misattributed as a lack of focus to me. Knowing how well screens are getting communicated/called out by teammates is key for context. Understanding what type of defense a team is running or supposed to be running, also is key for context. But again, if you are a player that didn’t come up trained to see things other than what’s right in front of you (something that I do think happens in players who are mostly taught through isolated trainer gym workouts outside of group play), is it a lack of focus and awareness, or is not having tested and honed peripheral vision? Can I say absolutely for sure, probably not, but I feel quite confidently that getting killed constantly by off-ball actions is much more about how much you weren’t tested or ran through the gamut in your youth. Part of what I struggle with so much with the vast majority of our youth system is that it is results-oriented. We spend most of our time teaching kids to win instead of teaching kids how to get better at something. We find and latch onto the elite traits already present, build those up, and that is huge in pushing the ability to win in high school basketball and pre-college competition, hell, even in college competition this is a real factor as well. If you are bad at something playing 9th grade AAU, it’s more likely that your team will play differently to accommodate that or work around it, rather than a focused developmental approach. (ASIDE: it’s worth noting that this is meant in application to pro level players. When you are a top 50ish kid coming up, you’re rarely just going to get benched or not play long periods because you made a mistake. The offensive/defensive system a player is in at that level in age group play is almost definitely being catered to with respect to strengths/weaknesses, as that’s key in winning games. I don't mean this necessarily as a bad thing, it’s just my opinion and observation.)

• Confident Adaptation & Problem-Solving: I learn the most about a player when a play goes to complete shit. If something breaks down, the ball goes flying, and things start happening that go outside the normal bounds of what’s expected, how do you react? Do you pause? Do you get back cut by ? Do you go for the ball? Do you jump right in and make a great rotation in help that isn’t technically your job, but you just see the play? Being able to consistently play outside the play with confidence, quickness, and efficacy is a huge separator. I’d argue this is the biggest separator of solid role players and the very best role players we have in the game. The more consistently you make these plays in the grey area randomness of the game, the more value you can add, in my opinion.

I’ve been contemplating how to vocalize and write about this topic, and going through a podcast flurry at the beginning of the month, it just hit me. Slappin’ Glass is my most listened to pod, you can find so many phenomenal nuggets in further understanding the game in every single facet. Going back and listening to the episode when they had Geno Auriemma on just made it click for me.

Early on, Geno’s asked about coaching great players, empowering elite players, and what excites him the most about bringing those players to Connecticut. His response was just awesome stuff, but it also reinforced for me and gave a jumping off point to this aspect of feel and cognitive athleticism.

Geno goes on to detail when his staff recruited a player from Russia in the late 90’s, Svetlana Abrosimova, and she gets to campus after having seen very little of her (relatively) prior to her signing with and coming to Connecticut. Geno runs her through a workout, goes back to the offices and tells one of his assistants, that’s the best player that’s ever come to Connecticut.

Why? How can you tell?

“The way she moves, the way she just flows from one spot on the floor to the other, from one drill to the other, no matter where I gave her the ball or what I asked her to do, it was just so natural. There was very little thought involved to it.

So when you see people that can do that, you go. I can't wait to see what happens later on when they really understand the game better, put 4 really good players around somebody like that. That’s a quality that I think they’re born with in some ways you know, and they have so much confidence in their own abilities.

The kid that I have right now, Paige Bueckers, the trait that she has that all great players have, she never goes too fast. She’s never in a hurry to get from one thing to another. She’s never in a rush to get her shot off or get open. She shoots it at the exact right time. Everything is done on point and on time, and she’s only a freshman, and you go well how does she know that? The great ones just have that in them.”

Skill level, confidence, and knowledge all intertwine, as Geno puts it. If you don’t have confidence in a skill, you’ll hesitate. If you’re too confident in a skill that’s not up to par with said confidence, you’ll struggle with efficiency. If you don’t have the knowledge and understanding of what’s happening in front of and around you, you can make the wrong plays.

To add further emphasis, cognitive athleticism/feel is apparent in every facet of play. Having a good feel for how to establish rebounding position and timing the ball doesn’t mean you’ll have good awareness as a whole on the defensive end. Having a strong feel and cognitive training for making great rotations on defense in scramble situations doesn’t automatically make you a generational playmaker on offense. 

As Auriemma mentioned in that quote, feel and confidence are such massive aspects of being a great shooter. You can have the best shot mechanically in the world, but perception of your own openness and ability to shoot (a quarter of a second makes a massive difference) is what can often be the separation from good to great shooters. Getting up an extra three or four attempts from beyond the arc seems minor, but it is monumental in straining a defense and commanding gravity.

Think of feel and cognitive processing as a sort of variable in the equation of making plays. Again, feel isn’t all encompassing, but applied to its own subcategories of the game. Being a quicker processor/higher feel player in each area of the game adds that variable to the mix in a way that increases and amplifies margin for error. It’s like a rounding curve: It doesn’t give you the answer or an automatic positive grade, but in conjunction with a good skillset, it can be a massive difference maker.

To conclude, I do not have the years of education and coaching training to say “do this in order to improve your feel and cognitive awareness” but I do have enough data from watching and understanding historical context to feel extremely confident in this thesis. While I don’t anticipate some massive shift in the United States’ youth development, this is more to talk about the WNBA Draft and scouting as a whole. THIS is why I feel so strongly about players who exhibit the ability to play with a strong feel, particularly as it applies to offensive and defensive decision making. You can’t teach or develop that variable in the equation significantly once we hit a certain point, and at the highest level of the game, that matters greatly, and is a large reason for why I feel there’s significant value in these attributes.

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