Controlling the controllables #1

Sharing my thoughts as pro basketball heads into the off-season

I’m writing this for the coaches, trainers, agents, players and parents that need to maximize every advantage they can get.

It’s still the start of the 2022 NBA playoffs, but players from overseas are finishing up their seasons and returning home. Off-seasons and downtime are the best opportunities to make personal improvements, and I wanted to share some of my observations.

One step players can take during slower periods is to consume less social media. Or at least, consume it much more deliberately. If you’re on it, why are you on it? For what purposes are you on it? Do you really need to be and what are you looking for?

Deliberately consuming social media shouldn’t only be when things are going bad mentally. I think taking time away from socials, or deliberately consuming it, is so important because the lingering effects of social media consumption can last long after you’ve consumed it.

Author and computer science professor Cal Newport refers to “attention residue” when you switch focus from one task to another. The initial distraction like checking your feed may seem harmless, but that piece of content, especially if it makes you jealous or you have some sort of negative visceral reaction, it can drain your finite mental energy needed from the task in front of you that you should be focusing on.

More concretely, unexpected news about a player signing or someone else’s flex when you check your phone during a workout prevents you from focusing on what you do have control over: which is you and only you. Whatever is going on in the Interweb doesn’t improve your jumper by 1%, it doesn’t polish your ballhandling, it doesn’t marginally improve your reaction time and it certainly won’t up your market value.

I’m in favour of collecting players’ phones during team meetings, workouts and film sessions as a way to create an environment, and also create a culture, that removes distractions. For workouts, you can eliminate social media checks by having a playlist ready ahead of time and having a fully charged phone, so you can devote as much attention as possible to the workout, the task at hand.