This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.
One day before the NBA Draft, I sat down to take an exam. It was supposed to take 35 minutes. According to Jim Bowman, one of the test’s creators, I would need only an iPad and a quiet space to concentrate.
“We recommend a distraction-free environment,” Bowman said, “just as we do for elite athletes.”
Bowman, 48, is a licensed psychologist for a school district on Long Island. He’s also one of the co-creators of the Athletic Intelligence Quotient, a cognitive assessment used by more than a third of the NBA, including four of the last eight champions.
The test, known as the AIQ, is designed to measure intelligence most relative to athletic performance — traits like spatial processing, reaction time and learning efficiency. The results alone are not a leading indicator of NBA success — there is no substitute for length, athleticism and shooting ability — but in the 14 years since the test was brought to market, peer-reviewed research has found evidence that NBA players score significantly higher than prospects that do not make the league, while high levels of learning efficiency are associated with undrafted players who make it.
Since 2013, about 93 percent of draft picks have taken the AIQ. But in the weeks and months before the NBA Draft, the test is just one data point among many. NBA teams utilize physical testing, film study, statistical analysis, medical evaluation and old-school scouting intel. But there are also a lot of tests. Cognitive tests. Personality assessments. Psychological profiles.
Among others, there’s the Hogan Personality Inventory, which is rooted in the five-factor model of personality; the Reiss Motivation Profile, a questionnaire that assesses 16 basic desires of human nature; and the S2 Cognition test, which is based on cognitive processing research and attempts to measure how quickly the brain processes information.
When the Los Angeles Clippers selected guard Keaton Wagler with the fifth pick on Tuesday, team president Lawrence Frank cited his score in a “processing exam.”
“A top two or top three score of anyone who’s taken the test,” Frank told reporters.
I decided to try the AIQ because it was designed for athletes and subject to a series of research papers. So I sat down at my kitchen table, coincidentally just blocks from the Barclays Center, the site of this year’s draft.
I clutched the iPad in my hands and pressed “Start New Exam.”
Two hours later, I received an email with my report.
“Overall, you had several notable strengths and a few areas for development,” Scott Goldman, the test’s other creator, told me, gently. “Please note, you were compared to NBA players.”
The AIQ was born of a friendship that began more than two decades ago at the Albert Ellis Institute, a prestigious psychotherapy training institute in New York City. It was there that Jim Bowman met Scott Goldman, another psychologist undergoing post-doctoral training in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.
For decades, coaches and executives had considered a player’s intelligence in evaluating their ability. In basketball, they used phrases like “basketball IQ” and “court awareness.” In football, a smart quarterback had a great “feel for the game.”
It was unclear if anyone could define exactly what that meant. But one thing was certain: Nobody could measure it. Teams had metrics for strength, speed and agility. They could study game film and scout instincts. They could even do personality assessments, studying intrinsic motivation in the same way a hiring manager at a Fortune 500 company might.
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In the NFL, teams used the Wonderlic, a cognitive test created in 1936 by Eldon F. Wonderlic, a graduate student in the Northwestern psychology department. Consisting of 50 multiple-choice questions, the Wonderlic was designed to measure areas of math, vocabulary, and reasoning. It didn’t necessarily map onto the kind of intelligence seen on the field.
The issue, as Goldman saw it, was that tests like the Wonderlic were too concerned with measuring knowledge. That left them susceptible to bias. The simplest definition of intelligence concerns our ability to acquire information, process it and then apply it. In psychology, it’s a concept also known as “fluid intelligence,” or our ability to solve novel problems.
“You can really see intelligence shine when someone’s being given a puzzle that they’ve never been exposed to before,” Goldman said.
Bowman and Goldman saw sports as a “constantly mutating puzzle.” Exactly the kind of space that required fluid intelligence. So they set out to figure out every aspect of intelligence needed for unsolvable puzzles.
Using a widely accepted theory of intelligence and studying everything from firefighters to first responders, Bowman and Goldman launched the AIQ in 2012. It provided 16 data points, including scores in visual spatial processing, reaction time, decision making and learning efficiency.
The goal was not to offer certainty, nor was it to provide a pass-fail metric. Instead, they wanted to offer granular data on how a player’s mind worked.
In the process, they were helping reframe our most basic understanding of athletic intelligence.
When Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes took the AIQ, he finished in the top 1 percent of quarterbacks measured. Mahomes possessed what those close to him called an eidetic memory, which allowed him to process and filter information at top speed. People did not always think of a quarterback surveying the field and making a decision as a form of intelligence in the classic booksmart framing. But the way Goldman saw it, it very much was.
“Think about a shot that comes off the shooter’s fingertips,” Goldman said. “You have to track the trajectory of that ball. It then hits the front of the rim, bounces off the backboard, and you have to anticipate the rebound.
“That’s all intelligence. That’s you looking at processing, decision making, anticipating, reacting.”
Since 2013, about 93 percent of draft picks have taken the AIQ. (Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Nell Redmond / AP Photo)
In the years that followed, Bowman, Goldman, and a group of colleagues conducted peer-reviewed studies on their tests’ ability to identify performance outcomes in Major League Baseball and the NFL. But one day during the pandemic, Goldman gave a Zoom presentation to a group of strength and conditioning coaches.
In the audience was Scott Hogan, a doctoral student at Georgia Tech who had been doing chemometric analysis on rats. He asked Goldman if he could use the same method to analyze AIQ scores.
Goldman and Bowman believed that the AIQ can be used to help teams with organizational and cultural fits, providing information on how a player processes information. But when Hogan and Dan Taylor, then a player development coach at Georgia Tech, helped collaborate on a study that was published in 2023, there was an intriguing data set on 72 players who went undrafted but eventually played in the NBA.
They had higher learning efficiency scores than those who never made it, meaning they had a superior ability to store information into long-term memory and recall it later.
“They must be able to absorb coaching faster and pick up systems quicker, whatever it might be,” said Taylor, who later worked for the Charlotte Hornets for three seasons. “Just being able to improve rapidly is useful.”
I wondered how I compared.
The first thing I had to do was log my name, position and university in the AIQ app.
First name: Rustin
Last name: Dodd
Position: Guard
School: University of Kansas
Well, it was where I went to school. The first section of the AIQ was titled “shape rotations.” At the top of my iPad screen was an odd shape that looked like a “L” with a jagged bottom. At the bottom was a collection of similar shapes, turned sideways, upside down, or presented as a mirror image. In a matter of seconds, I had to determine which ones were exactly the same as the one at the top.
The section lasted for two minutes. I made it through nine or 10 shapes. It was simple enough. For a moment, I felt like I was back in elementary school, taking a standardized test.
An example from the AIQ test. (Courtesy Rustin Dodd / The Athletic)
The second section was harder. Titled “Paired Associative Learning,” a series of pictures and numbers flashed on the screen one at a time. A picture of a hand and the number 10. A car and the number 31. A lightbulb and the number 77. At first, it seemed simple enough, but then the pictures kept appearing, 16 in all.
By the end, I had to remember as many numbers as possible. Which, to me, proved nearly impossible. It was hard to keep one pair in my head as the others kept flashing. I tried to use mnemonic devices to remember the numbers, but I didn’t feel successful. I looked at all the symbols: What number was the car again?
The test continued. One section showed me three colorful, odd-looking objects, then I had to pick them out in a series of grids of similar looking ones. Another was called “Route finding” — I had to find the quickest path between two squares in a grid that included a number of obstacles.
Many of the sections felt like simple computer games. In a section designed to test reaction time, I was instructed to hold my iPad with both hands and tap a button on the screen when a square appeared.
The first one popped up. I tapped the button.
.293 seconds.
That felt good. But a few times, I anticipated too quickly. A buzzer sounded.
Ugh.
By this point, I was locked in. My competitive juices started to surface. I had a handle on the test. One of the last sections consisted of determining if two numbers were the same as quickly as possible. I seemed to find a useful mental trick and fell into a groove.
No. Yes. Yes. No. No. Yes.
But then two long numbers appeared on the screen:
I scanned them quickly and thought I detected a discrepancy. I hit the “No” button. Just as I did, I realized I was wrong.
“No!” I yelled.
I wondered if my neighbor could hear me.
The scores for each category are measured on a simple scale: Anything worse than 85 is “poor”; 85 to 89 is “low average”; 90 to 104 is “average”; 105 to 114 is “strong”; and better than 115 is “superior.”
According to the test results, I possessed the following: Superior Spatial Awareness (116), Superior Visual Retention (129) and Strong Visual Spatial Processing overall (111).
The combination meant I should naturally understand floor spacing, remember sets and coverages, see how actions are unfolding and make quick decisions on the fly — shoot vs. pass, etc. My abilities had been linked to better shot selection, fewer turnovers and more efficient pick-and-roll reads.
But then there was the downside: My reaction times were in the low to mid-80s, and I scored poorly in something called “Multiple Target Search.” I was likely to be a step slow on close-outs, deflections and 50-50 balls. My learning efficiency skills were average, which gave me some hope. (I did go undrafted for the 18th straight year.)
But my AIQ results also came with ideas and tips for a coaching staff or front office. They suggested that they simplify my live reads, which would lean on my strong “target comparison,” and that they script my primary roles.
- Use him more as a “secondary creator” or advantage player rather than always primary initiator. Let quicker-reacting guards handle the initial collapse; Rustin plays out of the second touch where the reads are cleaner and fewer.
On defense, they suggested emphasizing prereads and anticipation in film and practice to cover for my slow reaction time. I would also be best in off-ball matchups, where my spacing and positioning awareness would help in team defense.
The last tip: The coaches needed to be intentional about help defense rules. That way, I would be playing with my mind instead of my first step.
I have to say: After playing high school basketball and nearly two decades of pickup, the last part felt shockingly accurate.
In the end, my combined AIQ score was exactly 100, which meant that compared to thousands of NBA players in their database, I was entirely average.
Not bad, I thought. Of course, it didn’t take into account my athletic profile. That was still lacking.
“Intelligence is definitely important,” Hogan said. “But it doesn’t make up for a lack of athleticism.”
Yes, it’s an obvious statement. It’s still worth saying.
Yet at the margins, Hogan said, the AIQ can offer something valuable, a measure for identifying potential diamonds in the rough, a separator for two players of equal athleticism.
It’s just one data point, and nothing can be perfectly predictive.
But in a world in which there are two prospects of equal size and athletic profile, there has to be an explanation for why one of them is better at basketball.
One of those reasons might be found in a 35-minute test.
