What I See Now That I Missed as a Player: A Coach’s Guide to Learning from the Pros

By Christopher Corbett, Founder of BasketballTrainer.com and AustinYouthBasketball.com, Co-Founder of BasketballHQ.com and CoachTube.com

Former college point guard, current basketball trainer who still competes in European masters tournaments. Parent of two basketball players—one at Macalester College, one committed to Kenyon College. I’ve coached rec and select teams and made plenty of mistakes along the way.

I watch NBA games completely differently now than I did at 20.

Last month I was watching the Warriors-Celtics game with one of my Vintage Run clients—a 52-year-old executive who still thinks he can play like he did in college. During a timeout, he asked me what I thought about Curry’s shot selection. I told him I wasn’t watching Curry’s shots. I was watching what Draymond Green was doing three possessions before Curry even touched the ball.

That’s when it hit me: everything I thought I knew about learning from NBA players when I was playing point guard at Maine Fort Kent was backwards.

As a young player in the Queens playground and later in college, I watched highlight reels. I tried to copy moves. I studied Stephen Curry’s release and Kyrie Irving’s handles. I thought that’s how you learn from the pros—by mimicking what they do when they have the ball.

Twenty-plus years of training players, watching both my daughters develop through college basketball, and competing in masters tournaments at 60 with seven knee surgeries behind me has taught me something crucial: the magic happens in the moments nobody watches.

Here’s what I see now that I completely missed then.

The Setup Nobody Sees

When my 50-year-old clients ask me to help them shoot like Steph Curry, I show them film of Curry during timeouts. Not his highlights—timeouts. Watch what he does 90 seconds before checking back in. He’s not sitting down. He’s moving. Light footwork drills. Touch passes with teammates. Getting his hands warm and his mind focused on his first action.

The shot everyone sees is the end result of preparation that started five minutes earlier.

I learned this the hard way training youth players who’d watch clips of Damian Lillard hitting game-winners, then show up to our sessions wanting to practice pull-up threes. They’d completely miss that Lillard’s game-winner came after 37 minutes of setting up his defender, studying how they played the pick-and-roll, and noting which way the help defense rotated.

Here’s what to actually watch: the three possessions before the highlight play.

When you watch Chris Paul run a pick-and-roll that leads to an open three-pointer, rewind. Watch how he set it up. Did he attack middle the previous possession to make the defense think he was going that way? Did he reject a screen earlier to make the defender over-commit this time? Did he run his man into two screens before even calling for the ball?

The brilliance isn’t the pass—it’s the chess game he played for the previous two minutes that made the pass inevitable.

At my training sessions in Austin, I have players do this exercise: Pick one NBA player. Watch them for an entire quarter, but only when they DON’T have the ball. No highlights. No stats. Just watch them move, communicate, and set up teammates.

What the parents tell me afterwards always surprises them: “I had no idea basketball was this complex.” Right. Because they’d been watching the wrong thing.

The Work Rate You Can’t See on TV

Stop following the ball with your eyes. I mean it—completely stop.

Next Warriors game you watch, pick one player and only watch them. I recommend Klay Thompson. Don’t watch Curry’s handles or Green’s passing. Watch Thompson work for 48 minutes to get open for three shots.

When I work with my Vintage Run adults—successful people who are used to being good at things—this is the part that humbles them. They see Thompson sprint through two screens, get denied, relocate to the opposite corner, sprint back through a third screen, finally get the ball for 1.2 seconds, and drain a three.

What they miss: Thompson just ran 40 feet through traffic for one catch-and-shoot opportunity. And he’ll do it 25 more times that game.

As a college point guard, I thought I understood spacing and movement. I didn’t. Not even close. I watched how players received the ball, not how they created the space to receive it in the first place.

The revelation came when I started coaching my daughters’ teams. I’d film games and we’d watch them together. I made them count—not points or assists—but how many times our best shooter moved to get open without getting the ball. The answer was usually 60-80 times per game. And maybe 8-10 times they actually got a shot.

That’s the work rate elite players maintain that casual observers never see. It’s not glamorous. It won’t make SportsCenter. But it’s the difference between high school and college, and between college and professional basketball.

Here’s the practical application: When you practice, don’t just practice the skill. Practice the work rate required to deploy the skill in a game. If you’re working on catch-and-shoot threes, you better be sprinting through simulated screens and relocating before every rep. Otherwise you’re just practicing shooting, not playing basketball.

How They Move When It Hurts

At 60, with seven knee surgeries behind me, I notice things about NBA player movement that I never saw at 20. I watch how Kawhi Leonard decelerates. How LeBron James changes direction. How Chris Paul protects his body on drives.

This might be the most valuable thing older players can teach younger ones, but it’s completely invisible unless you know what you’re looking for.

I’ve made this a core part of how I evaluate trainers for BasketballTrainer.com. When I’m reviewing a trainer’s methodology, I ask them: “Do you teach deceleration mechanics or just acceleration?” Most look at me like I’m speaking another language.

Everyone wants first-step quickness. Fine. But show me a trainer who teaches players how to stop and change direction without blowing out their knees, and I’ll show you someone who actually understands long-term player development.

Watch Giannis Antetokounmpo attack the rim. The highlight is the dunk. What I’m watching is how he plants and gathers. Where is his center of gravity? How does he absorb contact without crumpling? What does his knee tracking look like on the euro-step?

Seven knee surgeries taught me this: bad movement patterns will catch up with you. Maybe not at 16. Probably not at 22. But definitely by 30. And if you’re still trying to play at 60, you better have learned proper mechanics along the way.

The lesson here isn’t about injury prevention—though that matters. It’s about efficiency. The best players conserve energy through superior movement mechanics. They don’t waste motion. They don’t fight their own body. They move the way joints are designed to move.

When I train players now, especially my adult athletes, I’m obsessed with this. Can you execute that crossover without putting destructive force on your knee? Can you stop and pop without overloading your ankle? These questions matter more than whether you can dunk.

The Mental Game You Never See

Here’s what the broadcast doesn’t show you: what happens in a player’s mind between the mistake and the next possession.

I learned this watching my daughter play at Macalester. She’s a good player, but early in her college career she’d compound mistakes. One bad pass would become tentative ball-handling which would become complete passivity. The mental error was worse than the physical one.

The difference between college players and pros isn’t just talent—it’s the reset time. How fast can you forget the last play?

Watch Damian Lillard miss three shots in a row, then take and make a pull-up three from 28 feet with the game on the line. That’s not confidence. That’s a trained mental response. He’s practiced the reset between possessions just as deliberately as he’s practiced the shot itself.

I can’t show you video of this. You have to watch body language. Watch player communication. Who talks to themselves after a mistake? Who looks at the bench? Who immediately sprints back on defense like nothing happened?

Draymond Green is the master class here. He’ll commit a stupid foul, scream at the ref, get a technical, and then immediately lock in defensively like he’s been meditating for an hour. That switch is trained.

With my younger players, I’ve started building “reset drills” into training. We do a difficult skill sequence—say, a complex dribble move into a contested finish. Whether they make it or miss it, they have exactly three seconds to reset mentally before we go again. No dwelling. No celebrating. Reset and execute.

The best pros have a goldfish memory for mistakes and an elephant’s memory for what works.

What to Actually Practice

Here’s where most players get it backwards. They watch LeBron do something spectacular, then go to the gym and try to replicate the spectacular part. They skip the foundation that made it possible.

I’ve trained over 200 players individually, and the ones who make the biggest jumps understand this: you don’t practice the highlight, you practice the prerequisite.

Want to finish like Kyrie Irving? Great. Do you have the body control to execute a basic layup with either hand while changing speeds? No? Then you’re not ready for Kyrie’s stuff yet. Master the boring foundation first.

This drives parents crazy because they want to see their kid working on exciting moves. But I’ve watched this pattern hundreds of times: the player who spends a year on fundamentals will eventually surpass the player who spent that year on YouTube moves.

When you’re learning from NBA players, here’s my framework:

First, identify the skill that makes the highlight possible. If you’re watching a Ja Morant dunk, the prerequisite isn’t jumping higher—it’s the deceleration and gather that creates the space to explode.

Second, find where that player practices that prerequisite. Most NBA teams now post practice footage. Watch what they drill when nobody’s keeping score. That’s what matters.

Third, practice the prerequisite until it’s unconscious. Only then add the next layer.

I see this working with my adult players all the time. They want to play like they’re 25, but they haven’t trained like they’re 60. So we strip it back to footwork, to balance, to core strength. The “boring” stuff. And six months later, they’re moving better than players half their age who are just relying on athleticism.

The Real Lesson

If I could go back and talk to myself as a college point guard, I’d tell him to stop watching highlights and start watching the 42 minutes of game footage between highlights. That’s where the real learning happens.

The best basketball players in the world aren’t successful because they do extraordinary things. They’re successful because they do ordinary things with extraordinary consistency, work rate, and mental discipline.

You want to learn from the pros? Stop trying to copy their magic moments. Start copying their preparation, their work rate, their movement efficiency, and their mental resets.

Because here’s what I know after two decades of training players and watching my own daughters navigate this sport: the players who focus on the unsexy fundamentals, who outwork everyone in the invisible moments, and who build proper movement patterns—those are the ones who stick around.

Not the ones chasing highlights.