Rare is the player who arrives in the NBA ready made for greatness, so how do teams ensure their draft picks have the tools to thrive in the pros?

Predicting NBA performance from a handful of NCAA games is, at best, an imperfect science. And identifying and drafting talent is only half the equation, trusting the process requires time and patience.

This is especially true in today’s NBA, where seven-footers are expected to shoot threes and handle the ball, and point guards have to be ready to match up with bigger players off the pick and roll. So often, especially with younger players entering the NBA, there are weaknesses — shooting, ball-handling, physicality — that need to be corrected. Rare is the player who arrives in the NBA ready made for greatness.

So, as we near the NBA draft, we are flooded with terms like ‘upside’, ‘ceiling’, and ‘project’. With all the uncertainty those terms entail, how do teams figure out if Lonzo Ball is the next Ricky Rubio or Jason Kidd? Or whether Markelle Fultz has the explosiveness to be effective in the NBA? Will one of those players develop into an All-NBA talent?

NBA draft: is the No1 overall pick the No1 overvalued thing in sports? Read more

For Ball, those problems may off the court, as any team that drafts him will likely have to endure the outlandish statements of his father, LaVar. As for on the court flaws, Ball shoots from the left side of his head — he’s right-handed — an unorthodox motion that will make it difficult to come off screens or shoot off the dribble when moving to his right. Can Ball be able to be successful without changing his mechanics? Perhaps, but it’s a virtual guarantee that every defender will play on those weaknesses, forcing him out of the comfort zone that made him successful in college.

If he elects not to change his shot, what we see might be what we get, a pass-first point guard that will struggle to create his own shot.

Like Ball, few players arrive in the NBA with a fully developed skill set, especially since many spend only a year in college. Even in the best college programs, coaches are reluctant to address flaws, preferring wins over development. Changing something as fundamental as shooting mechanics might take years, a sacrifice that college programs often can’t or won’t take.

Though Josh Jackson, a potential lottery pick like Ball, faced similar questions about his shooting technique, Bill Self, his coach at Kansas, preferred the NBA to work on Jackson’s flawed mechanics. “Now can he tighten it up and do some things differently? Absolutely. But that will probably be on somebody else’s watch. I don’t see a reason why when you have a young man for a very brief period of time why you want to totally cloud his brain with something other than very, very few, simple things.”

To be fair, college coaches like Self might only have a player for months not years, severely limiting college development. So that often leaves NBA teams with players possessing enormous raw, yet unrefined, athletic gifts. In the NBA, the job cultivating those raw talents into all-star skills is usually handed to sports performance specialists and development coaches, often former players with similar skills or positions.

For those coaches, finding weaknesses in a player’s game is easy, because every player has them. “Every player has flaws in their basketball skills and physical tools. Of course it’s not easy picking out flaws in guys such as LeBron James and Steph Curry, but I suspect they both have areas of their game or bodies they would like to improve,” says Mark McKown, director of sports science and assistant coach for the Utah Jazz.

But turning weaknesses into strengths, or at minimum turning them into less of a weakness, requires a buy-in from players, especially since most of the skill work is done during the off-season. Adam Filippi, a scout for the Charlotte Hornets and a shooting consultant, believes that, for many players, acknowledging they have a problem with shooting mechanics is difficult. “The last thing that a player wants to admit is that they need to change their shot.”

While everyone expects immediate results, developing skill takes time, something in short supply during an NBA season. “The problem we face as sports performance specialists comes when a player is getting a lot of minutes of playing time and this is stacked on top of NBA time constraints,” says McKown. For McKown this often comes down to optimally managing the time they do have, designing programs for each player that address specific areas for improvement.

To make significant changes, players need to be free from the demands of the season and need to produce on the court. “When players are still perfecting technique, it’s best to stay away from games, because they’ll just revert to prior technique,” emphasizes Filippi. Establishing a skill like shooting takes three distinct steps – mechanics, repetition, and then competition.

And though it’s popular to equate repetition with skill development, correct mechanics is a prerequisite to skill improvement. Ten thousand hours of practice will improve skill but not as much as 10,000 of practice with the correct mechanics.

Often, if there are too many mechanical problems, a player may need to rebuild shooting technique from the ground up. “The farther you stray away from the basic principles of shooting — balance, hand position, alignment, follow through — the harder it is to shoot effectively.” Though sometimes players will struggle when not in rhythm, Filippi believes that a shooter possessing three or four of those principles will have success. However, establishing those principles might take years.

Players who are changing position as they move to the professional game need to be proficient in a variety of skills: ball handling, shooting, the ability to get the ball to the basket in traffic. McKown believes that European/international big men tend to come to the league with better perimeter skills, because they work on these skills more during practices and games.

For some players, the D-League offers the opportunity to address specific weaknesses in a player’s skill set, under the supervision of a coaching staff invested in developing a player for a specific system or purpose.

“The D-League has created an opportunity for draft picks who seem destined to be good players but whose skills aren’t developed to a high enough level the chance to do just that under the regular observation of NBA player personnel scouts, management and coaches,” says McKown. Similarly, the D-league also offers players a chance to focus on developing their bodies.

But often D-League teams face similar constraints to their NBA parents. “D-league teams are faced with similar time limitations due to travel, games, time to recover, etc, and they don’t always have easily accessible training facilities.”

This doesn’t mean that Ball, Jackson or other draftees can’t contribute to a team. Just don’t expect them to completely develop their game in the first season as, unfortunately, there aren’t any shortcuts when it comes to developing talent.