Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (26 page)

“It’s really more of a routine [in Phoenix.] ‘We need you to do this. This is what we need you to do to be effective.’ Coach would be in film, and be like, ‘This is what we want you to do. Can you do this on a nightly basis, and how can we tailor this toward what you’re good at?’”

Frye declined the cheap second-year option on his contract and, in the summer of 2010, when the Suns were poised to lose power forward Amar’e Stoudemire in free agency, he re-signed with the team on a five-year, $30 million deal that included a $6.8 million player option in the fifth season.

In 2010–11, Frye took an incredible 5.7 threes a game, and connected on 39 percent of them. With additional minutes, he set career highs in both scoring (12.7 points) and rebounds (6.7) per game, while also converting on 48 percent of his 2-point attempts. He never was quite that good again as a Sun, and actually missed the 2012–13 season with an enlarged heart diagnosis, but in his final season in Phoenix, in 2013–14, Frye made 37 percent of 432 3-point attempts. In three of his four seasons with the Suns, Frye attempted at least 53 percent of his shots from behind the arc after maxing out at just 12 percent in his second season in Portland.

After his rookie contract, Frye knew he needed to adapt in order to survive in the league, and the huge adjustment he made not only kept him in the NBA, but made him a very significant amount of additional money. Not every player, though, is willing or capable of such a transformation.

“Some people, they get told what their role is, which is I think sometimes easier. Some other people, it’s just by playing a game and finding something they’re really good at, and understanding that’s their niche and growing from there,” said then–Philadelphia 76er wing Luc Mbah a Moute, who kept himself in the league because of his prowess as a defensive specialist and solid locker room presence.
“I think that the mistake some of the young players make sometimes is they come into the league and they don’t know what their niche is. I think it’s something you got to recognize: it’s always what your niche is and growing from there, expanding your game from there.”

Frye leveraged his success in Phoenix in the summer of 2014, when the Orlando Magic, desperately in need of some perimeter shooting to complement big man Nikola Vucevic and athletic-but-not-dead-eye guards Victor Oladipo and Elfrid Payton, lured Frye to the Magic Kingdom with a four-year, $32 million offer.

His first season with the Magic didn’t go as well as expected as the Magic under coach Jacque Vaughn struggled with any kind of offensive continuity. Frye shot the three well for the first two months of the season, but was a really low-usage player. As his possession usage ramped up, his shooting dropped off before recovering some toward the end of the season, but for the entire season, he cut down on his 2-point attempts drastically. In his first year with the Magic, Frye took a full 73 percent of his shots from behind the 3-point arc, making over 39 percent of them.

Still, Frye’s is a story of NBA survival and evolution. Once on the verge of fading out of the league, Frye reinvented himself with the help of a prescient staff in Phoenix, and that has been worth at least another $50 million in guaranteed compensation. Frye clearly understands the necessary mindset and the potential value of being someone like him in the current NBA.

“A lot of these guys coming out, they’re the superstars and the go-to guys,” Frye said. “Everyone wants to be the Jordans and the Kobes and the Kevin Durants, but sometimes teams will pay for the Nick Collisons, for the Ben Gordons, for the Channing Fryes. That’s just the thing, and that goes back to the idea of who you think you are, and attaching yourself to what’s going to keep me in the NBA and getting those nice paychecks.”

CHAPTER 9

The World’s Most Perfected Player

            
One of the things about Korver that’s really unbelievable is that he averages about thirteen points per game, but you go into the game and you have to treat him like he averages thirty, or else it could be thirty. I think that’s where he presents a whole lot of challenges. He presents a whole lot of challenges in his cuts, how much attention you give him off the cuts, how much he opens up for everyone else. He’s a really good player.

—Brad Stevens, head coach, Boston Celtics

T
he creation of perhaps the deadliest 3-point shooting stroke in NBA history spawned from an impromptu tennis session at a Caribbean beach resort about four years ago, when during an All-Star weekend trip to the Turks and Caicos Islands, Kyle Korver wanted to get some exercise.

“I had a hip problem, and I got a cortisone shot right before All-Star break, so I decided to rest for a couple of days and then do something on it,” Korver said. “So I went to this resort and there was a tennis court there, and there was a pro, and I was like, ‘I played tennis in high school, what if I just play some tennis for a little bit?’ It wasn’t anything dramatic. I hit balls with them for forty-five minutes, just to move and do something outside. It was amazing.

“Two hours later, my elbow was completely swollen. My right elbow, it was just horrible. I couldn’t move it. It just felt so tight and stiff. And I was like, ‘Oh, no. I’m going to have to go back to Chicago and explain to Thibs [head coach and known taskmaster Tom Thibodeau] that I can’t play because I hit some tennis balls.’ Do I make up a new story? I told the trainer I had swelling, I was sore, I couldn’t shoot, I could hardly bend it. Had it drained, got a cortisone shot, tried to play the next day, because I was not going to miss a game because I played tennis.

“But I couldn’t shoot it like that. I couldn’t shoot a 2-point shot for almost two weeks, but I could shoot a three, but my elbow had to be completely straight. This mattered, it had to be there,” Korver said, showing his elbow tucked in straight and positioned lower than he had previously held it when he began his shooting motion, “and then it wasn’t all the pressure on my [elbow].

“I was using more than just that part,” Korver said, pointing to his right forearm, “and it felt so weird, but I think I shot 80 percent for threes for two weeks.” [It was actually 26-for-56, for 46.4 percent, over his next fourteen games.] “I was like, ‘This is so strange. Why?’ But now, what is one of the things I think about every day while I’m shooting? This matters if it’s there [showing his elbow completely aligned with his forearm], and here [showing the elbow flared out, a fraction off-center]. I now feel it when I shoot. If I miss it, I felt that my elbow was a half-inch out.”

This tale is not to suggest that Korver suddenly became a great shooter out of nowhere. He was a top marksman in college, and had annually shot between 38 and 43 percent from the arc as a professional prior to arriving in Atlanta in 2012. Since then, though, Korver has completely redefined and raised his ceiling as a player through a comprehensive mix of accumulated experiences, highly refined practice, advanced data and film work, and off-court training and lifestyle choices that have both healed his body and emboldened his mind. The total body of work—along with a tennis session—has
transformed a competent NBA role player into a regular headliner who has evolved into one of basketball’s most disruptive offensive players.

Kyle Korver is not the best basketball player in the world, but he is the most
perfected
player.

You cannot become great without a solid base to work from, and Korver definitely had that. Long before he was regularly knocking down threes, he was already immersed in a family basketball culture unlike many others.

Korver spent his early years in Los Angeles (before a middle-school move to Iowa) and spent many a night watching Pat Riley’s Showtime Lakers with the rest of his family, all of whom had established (or went on to) some level of basketball excellence themselves. Korver is the oldest of four brothers, and all of them played in Division I in college. Additionally, his father, mother, and two uncles all played in Division III at Iowa’s Central College, and his mother once scored seventy-four points in a high school game. According to a 2013 feature from
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hawks beat writer Chris Vivlamore, it was Korver’s mother who provided him with the piece of lasting advice that initially
made him into a good shooter.

“She said, ‘Kyle, if you look at the front of the rim, you hit the rim,’” Korver said in that column. “‘You look at the back of the rim, you hit the back of the rim. Look just over the front of the rim, and the ball goes swish.’”

Having so many family members capable of playing quality basketball meant that, from a young age, Korver had ample opportunities to be in gyms, around pickup games, and on the periphery of simple shooting practices on backyard courts. He would regularly watch his uncle play in high school, and would rebound for older relatives when they practiced. Per Vivlamore’s column, Korver wanted to belong on the floor with them, so when he first evolved to shooting
the ball with one hand, he did so left-handed (even though he’s a righty) because he could send the ball farther at that time with his off-hand. It wasn’t until a year later, after a relative asked him what he was doing, that he started shooting right-handed. Over the years, every family holiday gathering featured five-on-five games, and the way the games unfolded had a lasting impression on Korver.

“When I was growing up, when we were playing—me and my uncles and my dad and a ton of cousins, we would play basketball all the time,” Korver said, recalling those formative times after a February 2015 game against the Golden State Warriors, one in which Korver missed a wide-open corner three after good ball rotation. “We would all say ‘Extra pass! Throw the extra pass!’ I love it. That’s how I grew up appreciating basketball. The team that threw the extra pass, that team was going to score. The extra pass should never be missed, it seems like.”

Korver eventually matriculated at Creighton University, where he played in a total of 128 games over his four seasons. After first blossoming as a sophomore, Korver went on to win Missouri Valley Conference Player of the Year honors in both his junior and senior seasons. Over the course of his Bluejays career, Korver connected on 371 of 819 3-point attempts (45.3 percent) from the old nineteen-foot, nine-inch college distance, establishing himself as a top perimeter threat.

Despite his solid size and college accolades, though, Korver didn’t have the prototypical athleticism or ballhandling desired of wing players and slipped all the way to No. 51 overall in the 2003 NBA Draft. His pro career then got off to a rather ignominious start. As detailed by Zach Lowe in a July 2014 column on
Grantland,
the (then) New Jersey Nets selected Korver and then traded him to the Philadelphia 76ers for cash considerations that ended up covering the Nets’ summer league team expenses, as well as a new copy
machine for the Nets’ team offices. It wouldn’t be the last time that a team unloaded Korver for virtually nothing and then ended up regretting it.

Korver’s time in Philadelphia was up and down, with numerous coaching changes bringing different approaches to how Korver would fit into the 76ers’ plans. His rookie-year coach, Randy Ayers, wanted Korver to develop more of a mid-range game to complement his 3-point capabilities, but things quickly changed the next season, when former Boston Celtics head coach Jim O’Brien took over the team.

As Lowe describes in his column:

In the team’s very first practice, Allen Iverson ran a two-on-one fast break with Korver filling the wing. Iverson dished to Korver behind the 3-point arc. Korver took two dribbles, nailed a 17-footer, and waited for the applause.

O’Brien was livid. He screamed for Korver to look down at the 3-point line. O’Brien told him that if Korver ever passed up another open 3-pointer, he would remove him from the game. Korver remembers one thought flying through his head during O’Brien’s tirade: this is awesome.

Korver went on to lead the NBA that season, making 226 threes (a total that still stands as his most for a season) while shooting a crisp 40.5 percent from the arc. That season reinforced in Korver that he could play in the NBA, but the ongoing situation in Philadelphia, with its constant flux and questionable facilities, was not conducive to him thriving. Then, midway through his fifth season in the league, he was traded to Utah in a deal that included its own bit of flukish good fortune.

In December 2007, Jazz guard Gordan Giricek got into a verbal confrontation with head coach Jerry Sloan during a timeout in a game in Charlotte. Sloan, who was very successful and very old-school, predictably didn’t react well to the incident, sending Giricek to the locker room and then sending the guard home for the following three games for the insubordination. Giricek never played
another minute for the Jazz. Two weeks later, he and a conditional first-round draft pick went to the 76ers in exchange for Korver, who for the first time since his Creighton days, had the structure and support he craved.

“It was very different [going] from coach to coach [in Philadelphia] to ‘this is what it is and you are part of a team,’” Korver said. “We [had] practice at 10 a.m. every single day, no matter what time we got in the night before, and we practiced. And Deron Williams played forty minutes last night? He practiced hard at 10 a.m. every day. It was just a whole different approach.

“And I think that was the first time that—I’ve always been a gym rat, or whatever you want to call it, want to be in there, want to play, love the game, think about it all the time—but that was, it was just a different approach to the NBA. A more professional approach. I had a couple of good vets my first couple of years in Philly, but [in Utah] there was a team full of guys who were committed to the team, and we wanted to win a championship, and we believed we could win a championship. We had the Lakers back then. Those Lakers were good, but we really thought that we could beat them.”

But while Korver’s mind was being put at ease by the Jazz’s straightforward approach, his body didn’t cooperate. His three seasons with Utah, while still decent performance-wise, were undermined by a series of injuries, including one where, according to Korver, the tip of his knee cap broke off, causing him all sorts of extended pain and soreness. Fortunately for him, though, the Jazz were the first NBA team to contract with P3 for movement testing and refinement. It started with a small set of players including current Hawks teammate Paul Millsap, and eventually evolved into the team sending all of their players down to Santa Barbara for a week, where they got personalized training plans. In Korver’s mind, the workouts there probably saved his career, because for the first time in years, he had some hope of feeling healthy enough to improve.

“It was between getting to a spot where my body was pretty broken, going to P3, and then for a short period of time—it’s like when you know that, when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, or you know that something will get better if you do the work, you’re so much more willing to put in the work,” Korver said about his buy-in with P3’s methods. “Especially when you are down, you are broken, and especially in basketball. I felt, if I do this, I can get back to playing how I want to play basketball again and not have to worry about which move I can’t make, or which turn I can’t make, or that just totally you become robotic.

“And that’s what I felt like I was becoming. I couldn’t turn on my left leg, I couldn’t pivot certain [ways]. It was hard for me to think about expanding my game, because I’m trying just to turn and pivot on my left leg. Anyway, so between being in a bad spot, finding P3, and then seeing the progress, I just got really excited and I really dove into it.”

The initial process of breaking down an athlete’s movement and then rebuilding it can be humbling for a player. Korver already was an established NBA player working on a multimillion-dollar contract when he first crossed paths with Marcus Elliott, with movement motions that had been ingrained since his high school days. Plus, Korver is not a stationary jump shooter; he moves at high speeds around screens, and twists and pivots quickly and forcefully to release his shots. Elliott wanted to alter a number of things in the way Korver moved and trained after P3’s motion capture systems and analysis determined that there were enormous problems with the way he was doing it.

“It was really funny,” Korver said, “because Marcus was standing there with a couple of guys, and I’m just standing there listening to it all, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, he’s horrible at this, and there’s none of that,’ and I’m like, ‘I’m standing right here!’ You feel really bad because they’re just [talking] like you’re the worst athlete of all time, how are
you even still together? That’s obviously not what he was saying, but that’s really what I was at the time.

“But I remember looking at one of the videos—they showed one of the camera angles, [and] you see your jump—and this was a big thing for me, seeing my movements, because I’m a visual person. A lot of people are.”