Please Use a Different Word
There is a word that ends almost every conversation I have about a player, and it tells me almost nothing.
“Oh, he’s good.”
“She’s good.”
“I played good.”
I know, I know — it should be well. But that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is that everyone in youth basketball has agreed, without ever saying so, to use a word that means everything and nothing at the same time. Parents say it. Coaches say it. Players say it. And every single time, somebody who actually watches basketball for a living has to nod and move on, because what are you going to do?
You can’t stop every conversation and cross-examine someone about what they mean by “good.”
But I want to. And I think you should start doing it to yourself.
Good Compared to What?
“Good” is a relative word pretending to be an absolute one. When a parent tells me their kid is good, they mean good relative to something — relative to the other kids on the team, relative to the kids at the local rec center, relative to what the player looked like six months ago. That context almost never comes with the word.
When a player tells me they played good, they usually mean they scored some points, the team won, or they didn’t get embarrassed. That is not evaluation. That is a feeling.
Shots are not good shots just because they went in. I’ve watched players hit heavily contested pull-up jumpers off the dribble with a hand in their face and hear “great shot” from the sideline. That shot went in once. It’s going to miss nine times. And at the next level, against better defenders with better length, it will miss all ten. The shot selection was poor. The result was irrelevant.
A player is not good because they look good against bad players. Put the same player in a gym with better athletes and better defenders and suddenly the “good” things they do — the ball handling, the finishing, the reads — shrink or disappear entirely. Level of competition is the denominator in every evaluation. If you drop it low enough, almost anyone looks good.
And yet, almost no one mentions the denominator.
The Clips Problem
This has gotten worse because of how we consume player footage now. A few clips can make almost anyone look like something they are not. You can cherry-pick five possessions out of fifty and build a highlight reel that tells a story the full film completely contradicts. Parents do it. Programs do it. Recruiting services do it.
I’m not accusing everyone of lying. Everyone wants to be good and they’ll find the good and share it. That’s what they should do. But clips are not evaluation. Clips are marketing. The difference matters enormously, especially if you’re a player trying to figure out where you actually stand.
You didn’t play good just because you scored 15 points. You could have scored 15 points on 25 shots against a defense that was collapsing on somebody else. You could have scored 15 and turned it over four times and fouled out. The number by itself is not an evaluation.
You can also play well without taking a single shot. You can play well by making the right pass every time, by guarding your player and always being where you need to be in rotation, by getting offensive rebounds, by changing the game just because of your presence on the floor whether you score or not. None of that shows up in the line that people read, and none of it gets captured in the word “good” either.
What Real Evaluation Requires
Evaluation is hard. That’s why almost nobody does it. It requires you to watch things that don’t produce statistics. It requires you to know what a correct decision looks like even when the outcome is negative. It requires you to understand what the next level of competition looks like, so you can judge whether what you’re seeing will survive there.
We do this every day — watching, rewatching, noting what a player does well in a controlled setting versus a live game, identifying habits that work now but won’t work at the next step up. It is the slowest, most repetitive, most unglamorous part of this work. It is also the most important.
The truth is, most people don’t want real evaluation. Real evaluation means you might find out the picture isn’t as good as you thought. Real evaluation means the word you’ve been using doesn’t hold up.
That’s why honest evaluation feels harsh. But an evaluation that doesn’t come back “good” isn’t mean. It isn’t a coach being negative, or a parent being hard on their kid, or a player tearing themselves down. It’s just accurate. And accurate is the most respectful thing you can be to someone who’s trying to get better.
Being true to yourself is loving yourself. When you’re honest about where your game actually is (the shot that only goes in against kids who can’t guard you, the handle that breaks down when someone gets into your body) you’re not beating yourself up. You’re taking yourself seriously. You’re saying your goals matter enough to deserve the truth.
And the truth is the first step. You can’t map a path to where you’re trying to go if you won’t admit where you’re standing right now.
So can we try a different one?
Next time you want to say someone is “good,” stop for a second. Good at what, specifically? Good relative to whom? Good enough for what level? If you can answer all three, say what you mean. If you can’t, then what you have isn’t an evaluation — it’s a hope, and you’re doing the player no favors by calling it anything else.
Aram runs Hoops College, a basketball training program in Charlotte. The program is the offer that follows from the argument. → hoopscollege.com