R7 with RF 70-200 F2.8 for sports

I've kept my EF 70-200, which is working nicely for basketball with a Viltrox speed booster.  I don't mind having a bit more light, but the real advantage is the focal length; 50-140 is a lot better than 70-200; unless I really want a wide shot I can stick with one body (my second body is a 7D mkII, which is hopelessly outclassed).

I'm still working on AF settings.  I was thinking a narrow vertical zone but haven't had a chance to set it up; it sounds like your idea is the same as mine.  I'm shooting at 15 fps EFCS; maybe I'll try 8 fps, but basketball moves rather quickly and having more frames means a better chance of getting the shot I want.  Electronic shutter wouldn't be a great idea here, both because of the movement and also because of the lighting (anti-flicker helps in our rather old facility).

I shoot exclusively JPEG.  I don't want to deal with raw conversion and processing, and there seems to be less and less need to.  I'm finding that ISO 8000 is much better than it was on the 7DmkII.  It was quite noisy on that body, but nobody ever cared.    At a pixel level, it's subjectively less noisy than the 7Dii was at 4K, which is impressive.  My workflow's simple: select my shots in KPhotoAlbum (this is Linux), crop and straighten them in RawTherapee, but rather than export them from there, just use the .pp3 files with my own bash/perl script to apply the desired crop and rotation along with an attribution with ImageMagick, which takes advantage of my 12 core (Ryzen 3900X) CPU to process a few hundred frames in under a minute.  I send the uncropped ones to my alma mater's sports information department and post the processed ones.  Here's the center jump from our most recent game against Tufts.  It's definitely not free of noise, but at any reasonable resolution, you have to look fairly closely to spot it.