In basketball, as an open-skill sport, coordinating physical, technical, and mental components is a key challenge in the training process (Shalom et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2025). A deep understanding of the game's specific demands, combined with physiological and biomechanical analyses of movement, is essential for the accurate planning of team training programs (Sosa et al., 2025). Such understanding enables the making of informed decisions when selecting appropriate training methods, ensuring targeted preparation for both practices and competitions, integrating advanced technologies, and designing tailored exercises using specialized equipment (Gottlieb et al., 2021; Marocolo and Souza, 2024). Although the past decade has seen significant progress in the integration of physical and cognitive components, along with the implementation of advanced technologies in elite sports, when considering basketball training programs, a substantial gap remains between the strong focus on physical training and the limited attention given to specific, on-court cognitive training (Fuster et al., 2025). This is despite the growing recognition of the importance of integrating both the physical and cognitive demands of the modern game (Zhang et al., 2025). Indeed, basketball requires rapid decision-making and, real-time adaptations to changing situations, and immediate responses to continuous pressure from various factors such as opponents and environmental (e.g., crowd noise) and variable playing conditions (Lucia et al., 2021; Shalom et al., 2025). This opinion article presents a modern approach that places cognition at the center of the planning and design of training programs, aiming to reduce the gap between physical performance and the cognitive demands of high-level basketball. Such approach has the potential to enhance specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) relevant to elite level performance, while also highlighting the potential for applying advanced integrative technology (Beals and Paris, 2024) in the particular context of basketball.
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