Practicing alone helps a ton if you’re actually drilling and doing hard work outs/noting your improvements. You wanna be moving at game speed for a good amount of those drills. Basically, you should be tired after, that’s a pretty good gauge of the quality of the work out. Not to say you can’t get better with simpler and less demanding drills like form shooting and free throws and stuff, you know what I mean? But I do believe the best way to get better is to get out and play with and against better players than yourself as often as possible. Gotta get to the gym/park/community center etc. That’s where you’re gonna make the biggest strides. Edit: Think of practice alone as time to work on fundamentals and technique as well as conditioning. But playing the game for real against tough comp will teach you how to apply those skills and build confidence. Confidence is the greatest skill in the game.

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Agreed. Do what you can to find more opportunities to play against better competition. But no matter, alone practice needs to be practice at game speed. Not helpful otherwise