The process of shot selection

When I first started coaching, I knew I wanted to coach from a process-oriented mindset. Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets on poker and decision-making and the way fantasy sports players think about strategy appealed to my analytical brain and pushed me to think in probabilities in many areas of my life.

And yet, knowing these concepts and teaching them to teenagers are two very different things. The art of coaching is turning those ideas into tangible teaching tools so they not only understand them, but believe in them.

Early on in my career, I remember having many conversations with players that went something like this:

Me: "That’s not a great shot."
Player: "But I made it."

And I didn’t have a great response for that at the time.

But after years of thinking about it (and trying to shift players away from the results-driven mindset reinforced by family, friends, and social media), I’ve developed a few ways to teach a process-oriented mindset. In this post, I’ll share how we apply them specifically to shot selection (ideas that also transfer to many areas of coaching).

Teach in stories and shared terminology

One of the first concepts we teach our incoming freshmen is our terminology and way of thinking about shot selection. To do this, we give them this scenario:

Then, we ask these two questions:

• If you guessed heads and the coin landed on tails, would this have been a bad decision on your part?
• If you guessed tails and the coin landed on tails, would this have been a good decision on your part?

From that, we relate it to shot selection: the quality of the decision isn’t defined by the single outcome (just like choosing heads on a 75% coin is right even when it lands tails, a good shot is one we’d want again whether it goes in or not). On the other hand, guessing tails and getting tails isn’t a good decision: it’s a lucky result against the odds, just like a poor shot that goes in the basket.

Track and share the numbers

With the help of Hoopsalytics, we’ve tagged every shot we’ve taken over the past two seasons. This historical database helps us teach with measurable data, guide player development, and have clear, individual conversations about role and efficiency. Our players know the general hierarchy of these numbers:

• Heads 2's: 72%
• Tails 2's: 21%
• Heads 3's: 35%
• Tails 3's: 25%

We also use these numbers to teach our love 2’s, like 3’s mindset: It’s easy to see why we want a Heads 2 over a Tails 2 and a Heads 3 over a Tails 3, but why do we want a Heads 2 over a Heads 3?

To answer, we have players think about expected value by imagining 100 shots of each type:

• Heads 2: 72 makes × 2 = 144 points
• Heads 3: 35 makes × 3 = 105 points
• Tails 3: 25 makes × 3 = 75 points
• Tails 2: 21 makes × 2 = 42 points

Now the math explains the story.

Celebrate individuals

With these tags, we’ve built a formula using the value of each shot in order to quantify and grade a player’s quality of process in games.

Although some coaches choose an MVP on a hunch right after the game, we’d rather go back, tag each shot, and base it on the process of shot selection. This way, it’s less emotional, more objective (it’s almost impossible to tell who played well without watching the film), and it gives players fairness and clarity on why someone won. It also shows we mean what we say: the process matters more than the results (and as we always say, someone can go 2-for-10 and still win an MVP based on the process). We also use these numbers at the team level to evaluate our performance regardless of the final score.

We have a board in our team room with each game’s MVP's and our team grades from these process measures. In the film session after every game, we award a prize to the offensive and defensive MVP and celebrate them in front of the whole team. Everyone also receives a report with their grades (the most recent game, the last set of games, and the entire season), and we keep a shared spreadsheet so the numbers are always visible and transparent.

Celebrate shots in the air

On this Basketball Podcast episode, Ross McMains talks about a "coach’s clap," or clapping the moment a player takes the right shot, not after (or whether) it goes in the basket. It’s real-time reinforcement that the coaches value the decision quality over the outcome, and it trains players to chase process, not makes.

Remove the result

In film sessions, we cut the clip at the point of release and don’t show the result. We pause and ask, “Would we want this again?” Keeping the outcome off-screen keeps the conversation focused on decision quality.

Teach through practice games

You can also layer the rules below onto any SSG or 5v5 with a quick stoppage after each shot:

• Heads shot, made: award the points and keep the ball.
• Heads shot, missed: no points, but keep the ball.
• Tails shot (make or miss): no points and lose the ball.

In a future post, I’ll break down exactly what defines our heads versus tails shots (both the components we use to grade and how we teach them).