Where do you land after your jump shot? Not roughly — exactly. Most players have never once checked, and for drifters, that blind spot is the whole story.
Here's what drift actually does. You aim the shot before you leave the floor: eyes lock the target, body calibrates the distance, the plan is set. Then, mid-air, you slide six inches sideways or float forward — and now the geometry the plan was built on is out of date. The rim is a different distance away, at a slightly different angle, and your release has to improvise a correction in flight. Sometimes the improvisation works. That's the problem: sometimes.
Drift rarely comes from the jump itself. It comes from the approach — momentum from a cut or a dribble that your feet never caught. If you're still traveling when you leave the ground, physics finishes the trip for you. The players who look most balanced in the air are the ones who do the balancing before takeoff: feet arrive, hips square, momentum dies, then the jump goes straight up.
The test is simple and a little humbling: put a piece of tape on the floor, shoot off it, and see where you come down. Takeoff spot and landing spot should be roommates. CoachVision maps exactly that from one phone clip — where you left the floor against where you returned to it — so you can see whether the drift is real, which direction it leaks, and whether it's shrinking week to week.
The drill that trains the catch-and-square habit is Star 5-Spot.
Mark five spots around the arc in a star pattern — corner, wing, top, opposite wing, opposite corner, moving across the star rather than around it. At each spot you must square up fresh: feet set, hips to the rim, momentum fully arrived, then rise. Two makes per spot before you move on. Because the star pattern makes you approach each spot from a different direction, every stop is a new chance to practice killing momentum before the jump instead of during it.
One cue as you go: jump like there's a glass tube around you. Straight up, straight down. If a rep feels like it leaked sideways, glance at your feet on landing — they'll tell you the truth every time.
Fix the drift and something quietly wonderful happens: the rim stops moving on you, and the shot you aimed is the shot you take. Your feet already know how to do this — give them the reps.