I don't want to act like I have any great basketball insight or anything but two points I always make to kids who want to play basketball.
The first is easy and straight forward. Ball handling (que jokes) is the most underappreciated and important skill in basketball. It is something you have to practice. You can't play harder and be a better ball handler like you can with rebounding and defense. No matter how tall you are, good ball handling will put you one tier above the talent you otherwise would have. Maybe you are a center in high school and think, ball handling isn't important to me, but the difference between a center who can take a ball reversal pass at the top of the key and take two dribbles to get to the rim and one that has to reverse it and go post up is huge. It is what makes a bench player a starter, or a starter an all district.
The second is how I describe the stages of learning the game. Most players, either in middle school or first year high school start out basketball like playing checkers. These are the pieces, this is the board, you can move here and here and here. You learn the fundamentals of how to dribble, shoot, and defend. It is pretty straight forward. This is a 1-2-2 press, this is where you stand to beat it, this is a 2-3 zone, this is the play we run against it. This is triple threat position and bend your knees and don't dribble the ball so high. Those kinds of things. I'd say most people never learn the game totally in checkers form so they don't ever move on to really playing chess.
Then in second year high schoolish you start to learn the game like chess. This goes basically through college for most kids. You learn how the pieces interact within the game. You scout teams. Different pieces have different abilities so you can't play like checkers anymore. Now the game becomes more based on physical ability, fundamentals, while still retaining the basics of the board like checkers. I'd say the majority of pro players stay in this stage. I'd put a guy like Avery Bradley in this group. He runs the plays, understands matchups, his fundamentals are strong and he is a really good pro and will be for years to come. But when Avery drives to the basket, it seems like his chance of getting off a good shot is 90% lower than IT. Even though Avery is taller and should have it easier. Why is this? It is because IT has moved past Chess.
Players like IT don't play the game on the board anymore. They don't necessarily play the game with fundamentals anymore. They shoot a layup on the left side of the rim off their left foot with their right hand. You wonder how Kyrie can do what he does, how about James Harden? He plays the game in slow motion and still gets his shots off. Some people just have the instincts of spacial awareness to know just how much space they need to get off their shots and just enough physical ability to create it. How they do, I'm not sure.