The dribble package is the most coached useless skill in the game

Between the legs, behind the back, back again, and then a shot nobody in a real defense would ever allow.

Instagram is full of it and so is every empty gym in the country. Four cones, a trainer counting, a sequence of eleven moves ending in a step back. The player is genuinely skilled. The skill is genuinely close to worthless.

Here is why. A dribble move is not a shape, it is a lie, and a lie only works if there is somebody to believe it. The whole value of a hesitation is what it does to a defender's weight, and against a cone there is no weight to move. So the player learns the choreography without learning the trigger, and in a game he runs the choreography anyway, into a defender who is not fooled because nothing about the move was a response to him.

Worse, the packages are long. Three and four move combinations exist because they look good on video, and every extra move is another beat in which help arrives. Almost every great advantage creator in the league lives on one or two moves and a very good change of pace. The catalogue is small. The reads are enormous.

What I would replace it with is one on one, live, from a specific start, with a rule that a made basket after more than two dribbles does not count. The player gets very interested in his first move very quickly.

Now, the honest defence of package work. Handling the ball under body control at speed is a real physical skill and cone work builds it efficiently, especially for a young player whose hands are not there yet. It belongs in the warm up, at fifteen years old, and it should be understood as coordination training rather than as basketball.

The trouble is the market. Trainers get paid by parents who watch the session, and a session of live one on one where the kid loses repeatedly looks like poor value, while a beautifully executed cone sequence looks like a purchase.

So the wrong thing gets sold, because it is the thing that photographs well from the sideline.