Your practice shot diet does not match the one the game gives you

Players spend the morning taking shots in rhythm from a standstill and the evening taking none of them.

Count what a wing actually shoots in a game. Two catch and shoot threes with a hand closing, one of them off a curl with his momentum going the wrong way. A pull up in semi transition because the defense scrambled. A corner three off a kickout that arrived slightly behind him. Maybe a late clock heave. Almost nothing arrives clean, square, and on time.

Now count what he shot that morning. Three hundred, nearly all of them clean, square, and on time.

The mismatch is so normal that people stop seeing it. Practice shots are optimised for volume and rhythm because those things feel like improvement and are easy to count. Game shots are whatever the defense allows, which is by definition the awkward remainder. A player can be genuinely excellent at the first category and mediocre at the second, and the gym will never tell him, because the gym only tests the first.

Fixing it starts with an audit rather than a drill. Pull the last twenty games, sort every attempt by how it was created, and build the workout in the same proportions. If half his threes come off movement, half the workout is off movement. If he almost never shoots off the dribble in a game, stop spending twenty minutes a day on it, whatever he wants to become in three years.

That last part is where the argument happens. Young players want to practise the game they hope to play, not the one they are being asked to play, and there is something legitimate in that ambition. My compromise is a ratio. Seventy percent on the shots the role actually produces, thirty on the ones he is building toward. Not the reverse, which is what most gyms quietly run.

The most useful five minutes you can add costs nothing. Take the last twenty attempts of every workout and make them uncomfortable on purpose. Bad pass. Late closeout. Off balance. Shooting badly at the end of a good session teaches more than shooting well in the middle of one.

The chart will look worse. The percentages that get published will not.