A rookie's first summer should be spent unteaching, not adding

Development plans get written before anyone has watched the player move at NBA speed, and the plan is always a list of additions.

Draft night ends and somewhere in the building a document already exists. Year one priorities, year two priorities, a shooting target, a body composition target. It was written by people who watched college film and a pro day, and it is almost always a list of additions.

Add a floater. Add a pull up. Add a left hand finish.

The first month of professional practice usually reveals that the player is carrying two or three habits that will cap everything on that list, and nobody planned time to remove them. A guard who gathers on two feet everywhere, because in college he was quick enough to get away with it. A wing who catches with his feet already set toward the rim, which telegraphs the drive to any pro defender with a scouting report. A big who leaves the floor on every shot fake because he was rewarded for blocks.

Removal is slower than addition and far less satisfying to everyone involved. There is nothing to film for the club account. The player feels worse for six weeks because a habit that worked is being taken away before its replacement is reliable. Agents ask why their client looks stiff. Assistants who are judged on visible progress have every incentive to go back to adding.

I would spend the first summer almost entirely on it anyway. Not because addition is worthless, but because habits harden with repetition at speed, and the player is about to get more repetitions at speed than he has had in his life. Every month you delay, the correction gets more expensive.

The reasonable objection is that unteaching can break a young player's confidence in exactly the window where he needs to feel capable, and I have seen that happen. It argues for how, not whether. Change one thing. Give him a version of the old habit that is allowed in games while the new one lives in the gym. Do not let four different assistants correct four different things in the same week, which is the actual way confidence gets destroyed.

The plan should be written in October, by the people who have watched him for a month, and it should be shorter than the one written in June.

Mostly it should say what to stop.