Positionless basketball became an excuse not to teach anybody a position

Everyone is now a wing who can do a bit of everything, which increasingly means a player with no skill anybody has to plan for.

Six foot seven, guards three positions, can make a corner three, moves the ball. Every team has four of him and none of them can reliably do a single thing that changes a possession by themselves.

The slogan got adopted faster than the teaching caught up. What positionless was supposed to mean is that assignments are matchup driven and that the old five job descriptions no longer map neatly onto bodies. Sensible. What it became, in a lot of development programmes, is a licence to give every prospect the same generic curriculum. Ball handling, corner threes, closeouts, some switching. Everyone gets the middle of the distribution.

Depth is where value lives, and depth requires choosing. A player who has spent three years becoming genuinely excellent at short roll passing is a problem for defensive coordinators. A player who is decent at eleven things is a substitution.

So I would still assign a specialty at nineteen and defend it against the fashion. Not a position in the old sense, a job. You are the guy who punishes a switch in the post. You are the guy who never misses a corner three and cuts the moment the help commits. Then build the generic competence around it, because the generic competence is real and does need building. The order matters. Specialty first, breadth second.

The honest counterargument is that specialising early can strand a player when the game shifts, and the last fifteen years of basketball have produced several skills that stopped being valuable. Fair. It argues for choosing durable specialties, the ones tied to advantage creation rather than to a scheme, and it does not argue for teaching everyone the same thing.

Look at who gets minutes when a series tightens. It is not usually the versatile one. It is the player the other coach has to account for by name.

Versatility is what you say about someone when there is no name to be afraid of.

And the fix is not complicated. Pick the job at nineteen, tell him what it is, and give him three years of gym time pointed at that one thing. He will still learn to switch and still learn to shoot a corner three, because those get built by playing. The specialty does not get built by playing. It gets built on purpose, by somebody who chose it early and refused to hedge.