Yea, I get they think 'really aware' is a meaningful distinction. But, from an energy standpoint if your doing calculations and you need to pay for them. Further even at 160 mph it still takes the ball 1/3 of a second to travel the court so tracking it is useful to update how your hitting it even if you need to move your body based on predicted location.

Computationally, predicting the location is actually worse as it involves tracking the ball's location and then adds on it's likely location. It's basically stuck going ok my lagg is ~1/20th of a second so I see X, it's actually at Y, but my reaction is going to be anther ~1/20 of a second so I need to try and hit it at Z. And then continuously updating both Y and Z based on new information. Then on top of that you have multiple Z's for different things etc etc.

Consciously you don't really perceive that lag because your stuck with it.

PS: And of course each part of the nervous system has different amounts of lag. To the point where many decisions are made outside of the brain.