Paolo Banchero's Shot Prep Footwork & Kinetic Linking

Paolo Banchero has the potential to be the best player on the best team; that’s rare air.

He is a massive wet block of clay, and those are the most fun guys to work with because you can’t make more clay; you can only help shape it.

The Playoffs help expose a player’s warts like nothing else, and Cleveland has graciously revealed Banchero’s, providing him with the perfect roadmap for his off-season.

Shot Prep Footwork:

I was a decent shooter in my basketball career, nothing extraordinary, but pretty good.

One key aspect that made me a decent shooter was my meticulous shot prep footwork. I was taught to shoot my best possible shot; I needed to execute 1 → 2 shot prep footwork before the ball got to me.

But in 2017, on a trip to San Antonio to visit a former teammate (Danny Green), my idea of great shot prep footwork would get an injection of fresh perspective. This trip was before I had ever worked with any player on changing their shot, let alone an NBA player¹.

I attended a few morning workouts and observed the Spurs process.

I didn’t know who Chip Engelland was then, but I was instantly drawn to watching him work. I love shooting, and it was clear that he was getting more granular with players about shooting than any other coach, so I watched very intently.

I watched everything he did that week and peppered Danny with questions about what was being communicated during his interactions with Engelland on the car rides home.

I left San Antonio with a nugget of an idea courtesy of Engelland (not that he knew it) and, over the next year, built my Stacking² program by reverse engineering the simple idea gleaned from observing Engelland that week:

Shot Prep Footwork Is THREE Steps, Not Two

This simple idea became the epicenter of how I’ve changed NBA players’ shots since the summer of 2018.

1. Every player has experienced a minimum jump of 6% points on their three-point percentage while shooting career-high volume.

2. I call the program that I put every NBA player through Stacking. The program's concept revolves around compound interest; everything we do builds on the thing before it, so we get an effect similar to compound interest.