This involves understanding things such as acquisition of skills, learning curves, memory retention and transfer of skills, and how feedback helps your players learn to perform at higher levels. Meaning you first show a general idea of how a skill is to be executed, and then proceed to break it down and practice the smaller critical elements of a skill. Once those elements have been nearly automated, you can begin to put them back together as a whole again. However teaching just the skills is not enough. You must also teach how a skill integrates into the whole court environment.
Basketball is a sport that has a rapid and constantly changing environment.
Players must learn to read and react to many situations based not only on offensive and defensive structure but on circumstances they may not have practiced. Once basic skills are learned, then you must teach them as many environmental decisions as possible base to prepared them to execute in the games. When you deal with human beings you must have some sense of the role that psychology plays on the game. Psychology is the study of the human mind. If we were simply robots, coaches wouldn't have to have any knowledge of psychology.