Cutting is the least coached skill in professional basketball

Everyone gets a shooting coach and a handles coach; almost nobody is taught when to leave the space they are standing in.

Four players stand still and watch. That is the default shape of a bad offense, and the reason is not selfishness, it is that nobody has ever taught them what would make moving worth it.

A good cut is a read, and the read is on the defender's eyes rather than on the ball. The instant his head turns to the driver, the space behind him is available and the window is roughly a second long. Leave early and you clog the drive. Leave late and the help has already recovered. Leave in the wrong direction and you take a defender into the space the ball is going.

None of that is intuitive and all of it is teachable, and yet find me the summer workout that spends thirty minutes on it. The gym time goes to shooting because shooting is measurable and to ball handling because ball handling is fun to film. Cutting has no counting stat attached, which is most of the explanation for why it is neglected.

You can build it with a very simple constraint game. Four on four, no dribbles allowed after the first pass, score only from a pass to a player who is moving. Every possession becomes an experiment in timing. Players complain for two days and then start to see the eyes.

The objection I hear is that cutting is a function of spacing and personnel rather than skill, that in a well spaced offense the cuts appear on their own. Partly true. The gaps appear on their own. Somebody still has to decide to enter them, and deciding late is the difference between a layup and a charge.

There is a related failure at the other end. Because so few players are taught to cut, so few defenders are taught to guard cutters, and the whole thing sits in a comfortable equilibrium where nobody is very good at either.

Which makes it the cheapest advantage on the floor for any coach willing to spend a boring half hour a week on it.