Background: Little is known about which indicators of performance elite athlete coaches (i.e., professional coaches who coach at the national or international levels) consider to be important for basketball. Objective: Using a Delphi procedure, the aim of this study was to identify the non-game performance indicators elite athlete coaches consider to be important for the recruitment/selection of basketball players. Methods: Ninety elite athlete coaches (basketball coaches (n = 71) and strength/conditioning coaches (n = 19) who coached men (n = 60), women (n = 23), or both (n = 7)), employed in 23 countries across six continents, participated in a three-round online Delphi survey. Round 1 asked coaches to identify the non-game performance indicators (i.e., measures other than game statistics) they currently used (or would like to use) for player recruitment/selection, with common indicators combined into single indicators. Round 2 asked coaches to rate the importance of each performance indicator using a Likert scale (range: 0 = no importance whatsoever to 10 = extremely important). Round 3 asked coaches to identify the single best test measure for each indicator rated = 6 (i.e., important to extremely important) in Round 2. Results were reported descriptively. Results: A total of 608 responses (344 after removal of duplicates) were reported in Round 1, which were collapsed into 35 indicators, all of which were rated as `important` in Round 2. Psychological and game intelligence indicators were typically rated as very important to extremely important (i.e., median = 9), with physical fitness and movement skills typically rated as very important (i.e., median = 8). For most indicators, coach observation was identified as the best test measure, with unique objective performance/anthropometric tests identified for all physical fitness indicators. Conclusion: This study identified a range of psychological, game intelligence, physical fitness, and movement skill indicators that were considered by elite athlete coaches to be important to extremely important for the recruitment/selection of basketball players. These findings may inform the development of a basketball-specific test battery for recruiting/selecting and monitoring players.
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