On most teams, you find that one player. Especially for young players, there's always someone who's too quick for their own legs, too rushed, too out of control. It's usually because their body is both quicker and more athletic than their brain realizes, and it can take a while for it to catch up.
When I was a u16 player, we had one of those players. Too quick for her own legs, she would beat her defender, but throw the ball up, clanking it off the rim and then continue out of bounds, unable to stop. It was funny at times, but less useful in games. On the other side of the floor, however, she was a menace. Constantly getting a hand on passes on defense, throwing herself into rebounds.
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As crazy as it sounds, that reminds me of someone. Someone on the Dallas Mavericks, whose game has been looking too rushed. But then during the last few games, things seemed to improve. Zaccharie Risacher.
Isaac Harris of the LockedOn Mavs podcast saw the same thing, and – luckily for me – asked Mavs coach Dusty May about it.
"With Zacch, he's done everything we've asked him to do. And sometimes, we want to see you more before we constrain you, or before we want you to do this or that. We want to evaluate you to see, because sometimes guys can do more than they've needed to in the past, because of their situation. After Houston, we painted a really clear picture of what we needed him to do. And he's been very, very receptive."
And the coaching behind what they did to help Risacher slow down, especially his shot, is worth paying attention to if you're into the technical (and mental) part of what goes into making a good basketball player and shooter:
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"(Today) he was really close to having as good of a stat line as his impact on the game," May said after the Miami Heat win earlier this week. "His shots didn't look rushed, it looked like he was playing with a much – we call it quiet eye – with a much quieter eye."
I saw a number of people questioning the term after this quote, asking if this was real and if May just made it up. But the concept of "the quiet eye" is in fact a very real thing, it even has its own Wikipedia page.
When we talk about the quiet eye in basketball, we refer to the extended moment a good, usually elite player and shooter, stares at the rim – or space in the middle of the net – before shooting.
An elite shooter locks eyes, if it had them, with the rim before getting a shot up. The more pressure, the longer the stare. It allows the shooter to focus, as well as visualize, where the shot will fall and how it's going to look, the millisecond before you shoot. The better the shooter, the longer this moment is when the pressure is high.
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The quiet eye was one of my specialties as a player. I was a great shooter for a while there, and every time I was on a heater, I would see exactly where the ball fell just before I would shoot. It felt like prophecy, but it was more like visualization. And it works.
We see examples of this with the best shooters in the league every day. When (brace yourselves, Mavs fans) Tim Hardaway Jr. is on a heater, he does this very well. Klay Thompson, of course, and Steph Curry. Bogdan Bogdanovic is another great example. And I've seen new Mav Tarik Biberovic do it in Fenerbahçe. Watch his stare at the rim from when he takes the first dribble:
What we have seen from Risacher recently, and what we will see even more going forward if he manages to incorporate this, is a much better three-point percentage. He has the mechanics down. The quiet eye could help him get the needed focus and get his numbers up fast.
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"Zacch is finding himself now," Dusty May said
. "He's still so young. We really value and appreciate those plays. However many missed shots he had, he had twice as many loose balls, blocks, steals and rebounds and the ones that don't show up."
Here's a good example of what May mentions, this is just one play that stood out, where Risacher blocks a shot in a valuable possession for Miami with five minutes left, leading to a chance to secure important points on the other end for Dallas.
Risacher is doing everything right. After the Miami game, he topped the leaderboard in stocks
(steals and rebounds) with 16, an incredible number. Followed by Cooper Flagg (15) and Daniel Gafford (14), the Mavs players are really standing out early.
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Here's another one of Risacher affecting the game directly with hustling and rebounding against the Oklahoma City Thunder Wednesday, cleaning up the possession after a missed shot.
The Mavs coaching staff has been able to make this team play not only hard – as has been the strategy previously – but also smart.
"I thought tonight he painted a masterpiece" Dusty May said
after the OKC win. "He's impacting every single possession… (Sasser and Risacher) are lighting a fire under us, and it's been fun."
And it's paying off, the whole team looks to have great chemistry, which May also mentioned:
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"Just to see how connected our group is. They're so much for each other, it's fun," the Dallas Mavericks head coach said.
"He makes us 15, 20 points better when he's being active and getting steals and playing his defense," Cooper Flagg said after the Miami game
. "I have no doubt that his shots are gonna start to fall."
And the following game against Oklahoma, they did. Risacher made two out of three from beyond the arc, looking in control and maybe even utilizing that quiet eye, from the looks of it.
And after Wednesday's win over the Thunder, May revealed that the coaches see
Risacher as something out of this world sometimes.
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"(Risacher) never gets tired. One of the assistant coaches, Coach Fodor, said he's a cyborg. He comes out of a game playing five minutes that hard and he's not breathing (hard), he's just sitting there, you can't even tell that he's been playing…He's kinda reinventing himself, where even though he's not shooting nearly as well as he always has, he's found a lot of value in other parts of the game."
The same day, the Dallas Mavericks announced that they had exercised their fourth-year team option on Zaccharie Risacher for the 2027-28 season.
He's reinventing himself with the guidance of good coaching in Dallas. And he has proved himself very important to winning for this team already. Zaccharie Risacher is in a good place.
Find more Beyond Basketball pieces here.
