Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (28 page)
Authors: Andy Glockner
Korver had to settle for a (rounded) 49–49–90 campaign, still one of the greatest shooting seasons in NBA history, making 221 of his 449 3-point attempts. His 3-point shot chart on
NBA.com
looked like a minimalist painting, with all five regions outside the arc bathed in the sweet light green color of outperformance, and his marksmanship attracted the
attention of the league’s best players.
“The numbers he’s putting up this year, shooting over 50 percent, that’s crazy,” said Golden State Warriors guard and future league MVP Stephen Curry ahead of the teams’ first meeting of the 2014–15 season. “I think I’ve had—Klay [Thompson] can say the same thing—stretches of the season where you feel like you are on fire, and I haven’t touched that 53 percent number or whatever. It’s pretty remarkable to keep that going. I think he’s made some big shots, as well. You enjoy it when you see another shooter do what he does.”
Korver’s “worst” area from behind the arc was the left wing, where he “only” made 40 percent of his 90 attempts (which was still six percentage points above league average from that quadrant). From three of the five zones around the arc, Korver shot at least 15 percentage points better than the league average, converting nearly half of his attempts from straightaway and from deeper on the right wing while the league barely makes a third of its attempts from those regions. Given how often Korver is shooting, especially after sprinting around a screen, his success rates are astounding. He was even more lethal
from the shorter right corner, where he knocked down thirty-three of his fifty-eight tries for an effective field goal percentage of 85.3 percent.
For perspective on that last figure, Los Angeles Clippers put-back and pick-and-roll lob dunk specialist DeAndre Jordan converted 72.7 percent of his “restricted area” field goal attempts in 2014–15. Players with similar profiles, like the Phoenix Suns’ Brendan Wright and the Dallas Mavericks’ Tyson Chandler (now also in Phoenix after signing as a free agent in the offseason) were at 75.1 and 72.2 percent, respectively, per the SportVU data available on
NBA.com
. So, incredibly, a Korver right-corner 3-point attempt was worth considerably more in expected points per shot (1.706) than an array of dunks and putbacks from the league’s most efficient big man rim finishers (between 1.444 and 1.502, for the three big men above). You sometimes hear an announcer yell that an open shot is “like a layup” to a great jump shooter, and in this case, that was true—and then some.
Because the Hawks had effectively wrapped up the Eastern Conference’s top seed so prematurely, there wasn’t a lot riding on their stretch run of games, and the team tried to stay sharp and healthy beyond anything else. As such, conversation more frequently turned toward Korver’s run at history, as he had spent much of the season over the necessary benchmarks.
The chase, as it was—along with some roster shuffling and the relative lack of meaning in the games they were playing—may have affected Korver a little bit. Acknowledging that players “have to speak to the media every day,” he copped to being aware of where he stood, but “if you’re going to think about that, there’s a chance you’re going to start shooting tentatively. You know what I mean? You’re not going to shoot [as freely].” Korver said his late-season drop-off that pushed him just below the thresholds was more a case that his shooting elbow started flaring up down the stretch of the season than any pressure to maintain some round-number benchmarks. Korver ultimately had
surgery on that elbow over the summer (along with surgery for an ankle injury caused by Cleveland Cavaliers guard Matthew Dellavedova when he somewhat controversially rolled up on Korver’s leg during a loose-ball scramble during the conference finals).
Regardless, 2014–15 was Korver’s third straight season shooting at least 45 percent on at least 200 3-point attempts, tying him with two-time league MVP Steve Nash for the most such seasons in a career. There have only been thirty-four instances of that combo since the NBA first installed the 3-point arc in the 1979–80 season, and Korver’s shooting way more than most others on the list. All three of Korver’s qualifying seasons included at least 392 3-point attempts; Nash never tried more than 293 in any of his 45-percenters.
And, for the record, it was Korver who received the advice from Kevin Durant about his heels, and he did end up sticking with the approach to better shot-loading.
“It’s really good advice,” Korver said from Santa Barbara, where he was back preparing for the 2015–16 season. “It’s all about just feeling strong, feeling loaded, and lift up with your legs. Yeah, [it’s] definitely one of the things that I think about [when I’m shooting].” Korver said it took him awhile to really get comfortable with staying more solid through his heels, but “it’s like the story with my elbow, though. You feel like you’re doing it right.”
After the Hawks’ regular-season success, the end of the campaign didn’t go as expected. Hampered by an increasing number of injuries to key players, and perhaps having lost their sharpness during the insignificant final stretch of the regular season, the Hawks made hard work of a series with the mediocre Brooklyn Nets, were helped significantly in the second round when Washington Wizards star point guard John Wall injured his hand, and then were whitewashed in four straight by LeBron James and the Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals.
Nonetheless, at an age where most players are fading, Korver finally had arrived, feeling healthier than he had in years, playing better than he ever had, and impacting the NBA in ways that very few others are capable. The once-reluctant Hawk now loves being in Atlanta, and the Hawks fans have embraced “Threezus” as one of their favorite players. Three decades after Showtime influenced him at the very start of his path to the NBA, the way Korver is playing—and how he’s made himself into what he now is—is setting an all-around example for future players who want to reach their absolute personal max.
“What I love about Kyle is what I loved about Steve Nash and Grant Hill,” said Kerr. “There’s sort of an intellectual approach to the craft, not just a physical one. It’s not about just going out and practicing a bunch of shots. It’s thinking about how to get better, preparing your mind, it’s challenging yourself with different routines, different activities to search out what helps you the most. I’ve read a little bit about Kyle this year, doing so many things to improve himself, and the guy’s a pro. He’s great for the league, and obviously great for the Hawks. He’s a hell of a player.”
T
he 2015 NBA Finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors featured two major storylines that are incredibly relevant to this book, but neither may have surfaced if not for the dramatic ending of Game 1 in the series.
In that contest, the Cavaliers—sizable underdogs on the road in Oakland—had a wonderful chance to win the game on their final possession, but LeBron James missed a makeable driving layup and, after the rebound kicked out toward the right corner, guard Iman Shumpert was fractionally short on a catch-and-shoot fling that looked good when he let it go. The game went to overtime, and early in the extra session, Cavaliers star point guard Kyrie Irving went down with a knee injury. The Cavaliers ended up losing that game, and Irving never played again in the series.
With the Cavaliers’ other standout, forward Kevin Love, already having sustained a shoulder injury in the team’s first-round playoff series against the Boston Celtics and also declared out for the remainder of the playoffs, Irving’s injury left the Cavaliers with LeBron and a cast of role players. Shorthanded Cleveland suddenly looked extraordinarily overmatched against the best and deepest team in the league, which had hurt opponents all season with its shooting
and interchangeable personnel, and after the Cavaliers missed their chance to steal Game 1, most NBA observers expected the series to last five games, if that many.
Then a funny thing happened: the Cavaliers won Game 2 on the road. Then they went home and won Game 3, as well. Beyond the shock of the unexpected back-to-back wins, it was James’s role in how those games unfolded that created the series’ first major discussion point.
To be certain, a lot of things beyond the best player in the world carrying his team had to go right for Cleveland, given how short on firepower the Cavaliers were. In Game 2, the Warriors’ Stephen Curry shot a woeful five of twenty-three from the field, Cleveland big man Timofey Mozgov destroyed Andrew Bogut and the other Golden State bigs with a seventeen-point, eleven-rebound statement, and backup Cleveland point guard Matthew Dellavedova made some huge plays down the stretch of the 2-point overtime victory. In Game 3, Cleveland’s “Delly” poured in an improbable twenty points while Warriors forwards Draymond Green and Harrison Barnes shot a combined two for eighteen from the field as the Cavaliers won by five.
But the two wins were mostly about LeBron—who played 96 of the 101 total minutes—and how Cleveland head coach David Blatt orchestrated the Cavaliers’ approach, slowing the tempo of the contests against the league’s most up-tempo team down to an absolute crawl.
Time and time again, LeBron brought the ball up the court, pounded the dribble, and then tried to attack out of isolation sets. Sometimes, he scored (he had thirty-six points in Game 2 and forty in Game 3, albeit on twenty-five of sixty-nine combined shooting). Sometimes, he passed (he had nineteen combined assists, even though his teammates didn’t make many shots in Game 2). And if he missed, Cleveland was in good shape positionally to get back on defense and defuse any Golden State fastbreaks.
It was the most prudent (and perhaps only) approach for the Cavaliers, as they were constituted. It also was a strategy that had some quantitative merit. Remember that, somewhat surprisingly during the regular season, Cleveland had been quite good when it only had LeBron on the court without either Irving or Love, and most of the success in those (admittedly small-sample) situations came on the defensive end of the floor. The Cavaliers held opponents to just 88.2 points per forty-eight minutes in those situations, which was seven points better than the defensive per-forty-eight rate with all three stars on the court together. The trouble (understandably) came when LeBron also was off the court, leaving Cleveland without any of its stars. Understanding that many of those situations likely came later in blowouts, so the data could be skewed by game situations, Cleveland dropped to a -5.6 net per forty-eight minutes, and only scored 95 points per forty-eight minutes with only its role players on the court.
Basically, Blatt realized that the lineups with James could compete with Golden State, at least on the defensive end. He also knew the Cavaliers would be mostly incapable of scoring against the league’s most efficient defense when James sat. So, the plan became James playing as many minutes as possible, and hoping that gorging on isos and floor balance would limit the total number of possessions in the game and put Cleveland in position to steal wins down the stretch.
All Blatt needed was for James, essentially, to be inhuman.
That’s not hyperbole. During the series, ESPN Insider’s Tom Haberstroh penned a column about a gathering of elite sports scientists who ostensibly were at a conference to swap the latest in athlete maintenance techniques but ended up being transfixed by the NBA Finals, almost unable to comprehend the stress “load” that LeBron was
carrying for the Cavaliers. Haberstroh spoke with Michael Young, the owner and founder of Athlete Lab Sports Performance Training Center in North Carolina, about what Young was seeing in LeBron’s effort.
But the two-day workshop was overrun with talk of, and concern for, LeBron James. The worry begins with a baseline level of “stress”—that’s their term—surrounding all NBA players. Sports science has exploded in recent years with evidence that factors like mucked-up sleep, air travel and densely scheduled games put players in jeopardy. The NBA is elite in all categories.
“It’s unfathomable to go across the country from Cleveland to San Francisco—at the very least a five-hour flight—and then play 50 minutes in a game the next day,” Young says. “You don’t see that in any other sport. The travel stress alone can be debilitating.
“And then you add to the fact that basically it’s a one-man team at this point, and the mental and physical burden—it’s just overwhelming,” Young says.
Young remembers watching Game 3 while the trainers geeked out over the stamina of James, who was coming off two straight overtime games, including fifty minutes in Game 2. This was the party where people were dying to know LeBron’s heart rate variability scores—measuring his bodily stress levels. There was speculation about his OmegaWave outputs, a measure of neurological fatigue.
But mostly they just wanted to know how he could keep going at all.
As it turned out, James couldn’t. Or at least not quite at the same superhuman level as the first two games Cleveland played without Irving. But after Game 3, with the Warriors down 2–1 and already having ceded homecourt advantage, no one yet could accurately forecast what LeBron had left in his tank. Golden State had not played anywhere near its own ceiling and looked frustrated by the slowness of the games. The Warriors needed to change their approach and unlock their upside, or risk being one of the biggest upset victims in NBA Finals history.
Enter Nick U’Ren, a twenty-eight-year-old special assistant to head coach Steve Kerr, who provided the second major analytics talking point of the series, and very well may have saved the Warriors.
U’Ren started working for Kerr in 2007, when Kerr was the general manager of the Phoenix Suns, and stayed with the Suns through two additional regimes before Kerr, having taken the Warriors job before the 2014–15 season, brought U’Ren over to Golden State. U’Ren was not officially a coach or a scout for the Warriors. He was more of a consigliere for Kerr, helping him keep his schedule, being in charge of the music that played during Warriors shootarounds, and assisting with the execution of team outings, in addition to doing some video work for the team.
Like the rest of the Warriors’ players and staff, U’Ren was frustrated by how Cleveland was pushing Golden State around and making the series a slow, physical slog. Per multiple reports, U’Ren went back a year to find the basis for what turned out
to be a truly inspired idea, recalling how the San Antonio Spurs replaced Tiago Splitter in the starting lineup with Boris Diaw, who both defended LeBron and added more shooting and spacing on the offensive end.
U’Ren suggested to assistant coach Luke Walton that the Warriors insert Andre Iguodala, their best perimeter defender and a reasonable 3-point shooter, into the starting lineup in place of center and rim-protector Andrew Bogut in an effort to help slow down LeBron while also trying to speed up the pace of the series. Walton then communicated the idea to head coach Steve Kerr, who sneakily implemented the change
in time for Game 4.
After Cleveland jumped out to a quick 7–0 lead, the Warriors stabilized, found their footing with more athleticism and shotmakers on the floor, and with Iguodala playing more minutes to help limit LeBron on the offensive end, the Warriors rolled to a series-tying victory. Afterward, Kerr very publicly credited his young assistant for the clever gambit.
From that point on, the series was basically over. Golden State won Game 5 at home by thirteen points and, despite a last-minute semi-scare in Game 6 thanks to some late Cleveland threes, closed out the series on the road to win the title. Bogut ended up playing less than three total minutes in the final three wins while Iguodala ended up being named the Finals MVP.
The whole Golden State scenario was a microcosm of what this entire book is about. Thanks to savvy talent identification and player development, Golden State had the roster with which to quickly change gears. Thanks to James tiring after carrying such a momentous workload, the Warriors regained the extra margin for error their talent suggested they should have. And thanks in large part to a junior staffer, they found a possible solution, vetted the idea among the coaching staff, decided to go for it, communicated the idea to the players, changed their starting lineup and approach, and won three straight high-pressure games. That whole chain set a very significant bar for information sourcing, communication, and implementation under pressure.
It also validated the decision the Warriors made at the beginning of the season, the one where assistant general manager Kirk Lacob said that situations involving this type of specific on-court information would be a coach-driven enterprise, since the coaches were the people who were with the players every day. That let the players get comfortable with the flexible thinking of Kerr and his staff. It allowed Bogut to be OK with a strategic demotion in the biggest spotlight. It positioned Iguodala to be prepared to excel in a huge spot. It helped the Warriors be the league’s best team all season, and win the 2015 NBA championship that was rightfully theirs.