Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (27 page)

Korver then demonstrated how one of his knees was bowing in every time he went up for a shot.

“I almost threw up,” he said, about seeing the video. “I was horrified at my own mechanics. I got chills. I’m like, ‘I’ve been doing that every time I jump?’ But if I’m going to make a big jump, that’s the exact movement I make. Even when I shoot [now], my [right] foot is kind of turned in, everything just kind of feels like good to me, so I have this weird turn. Well, that’s going from your foot all the way up into your knee, into your hip, and then your back.”

Like any training method, P3 is not a magic elixir. The changes in motion and strengthening have to occur over a period of time, with very dedicated exercises and effort required to first implement and then to retain the changes. So while Korver was encouraged by the process and by Elliott’s expertise, he still wasn’t moving like he wanted to on the court, and at one point during the 2008–09 season, he seriously contemplated whether he could even continue his career.

“When you’re playing and you’re hurt, basketball’s not as much fun—and that’s why we play, because it’s fun,” Korver said. “And when it just becomes about trying to set up yourself for later on in life, making enough money, putting in enough years—that’s not a good driving force. So, my knee, some . . . things I could play through—they weren’t keeping me out—but it was just hard to play and it was a lot of work every day to get something to go.

“I couldn’t work on certain things at practice, and you’re not shooting between games because your elbow hurts or your wrist hurts or whatever it is, and then you’re not playing as well as you want to. Then with my knee, I just couldn’t do it, and we had a hard time figuring out
what it was. Is it tendinitis? We tried these little things here and there, and things would get better, try a tape-job and it helps out a little bit, and then all these things, [but nothing really helped].

“I remember sitting in my hotel room in Orlando and just thinking, ‘I don’t know if I want to play anymore.’ It’s not that I don’t love basketball, it’s just my body hurts, [and] I don’t feel like I can be very good. If I’m not going to be good, I’m not going to keep on trying to do this. And then slowly after that point—there were a lot of things that mentally, spiritually, [helped on] a lot of different levels—but I started to play a little bit better.”

Korver missed the first chunk of the 2009–10 season due to injury, but managed to connect on a searing 53.6 percent of his 110 3-point attempts after he worked his way back into the rotation. That summer, the Jazz elected to let Korver go in free agency, in part because they wanted someone who played better defense. Somewhat slighted, Korver elected to sign with the Chicago Bulls and Thibodeau, who is widely recognized as one of the NBA’s foremost defensive experts. It was in Chicago where Korver started to round out his overall game. He had to if he wanted to play.

“He’s by far the best defensive coach I’d ever had up until that point,” Korver said of Thibodeau, who helmed the Bulls until he was let go after the 2014–15 season. “Everyone talks about team defense, but no one teaches it like he does. And no one makes you repeat the drills and the footwork and everything like Thibs does. It’s a lot of work. You go to Chicago and you work. And you get better, but you put in work on the defensive end and a lot of it builds habits.

“Everything got broken down into exactly where I’m supposed to force my man, exactly where my feet are supposed to be when I’m guarding him, exactly when I’m gonna push on my man, and when I’m gonna release. Like, everything got broken down so small, and then you could focus on the details and not a bigger concept.”

Thibodeau’s approach to teaching defense was similar to how Korver thought about shooting, where he broke down his approach into
micro-checkpoints rather than worrying about his shot as a whole entity, or the results of his shots. Korver feels that if he’s sound in his approach, the results will follow, and it’s a process that undergoes frequent refinement as Korver continues to tinker with his shooting technique. In a January 2015
USA Today
feature by Jeff Zillgitt, Korver detailed an updated 20-point checklist that determines whether he feels right or not
when he releases a shot.

During our initial conversation, which happened a couple of months before Zillgitt’s article ran, Korver expounded on his approach, how he needs to think about shooting, and why Thibodeau’s approach really catered to his pre-established way of thinking about his game.

“I don’t even care if the ball’s going in,” Korver said. “I want to get to the spot where my mechanics feel right, because if they feel right, the ball’s going to go in. If I shoot it the way I want to shoot it, I believe it will go in every single time. When I miss, I feel like it’s because something was off, and why do we have a shooting slump? Why does that happen? Most of the time, it’s because your body is—something is wrong, and my body is out of alignment. I have something nagging, something going on.

“What feeds the rhythm? What feeds out of the rhythm? Those become focuses, not just on shooting and getting eight in a row to go in—and it’s the same thing on defense. Defense, with Thibs, everything got broken down so much smaller and to the littlest detail. And I need details in my game. I can’t go out there—like, a lot of great players can’t be good coaches because they don’t know what they did, they just did it. A lot of guys don’t know how they do it, they just figure it out, they just do it. But I can’t do that. I need to know exactly why something is happening or why I’m pushing someone where the help is supposed to be, and where the rotation’s supposed to be, and why my shot isn’t going in. I want to know it all—why my knee hurts. I like that stuff.”

Korver was on some excellent teams in Chicago, but the Bulls were undermined on more than one occasion by injuries and never won the NBA championship they believed was in their reach. The quality of those Bulls teams, though, was why Korver was upset when Chicago traded him to Atlanta at the 2012 trade deadline instead of picking up his $5 million option for the 2012–13 season. The Hawks, at the time, were a modestly successful franchise with a fairly moribund fan base in a city that typically struggles to support pro teams outside of the NFL’s Falcons.

In his first full season in Atlanta—Larry Drew’s third and final season in charge of the Hawks—Korver became a starter for the first time since 2005–06, when he was still with the 76ers, and was excellent, connecting on 45.7 percent of his 414 3-point attempts while posting a career-best effective field goal percentage of 62.1 percent. Then came the fateful summer of 2013, where the Hawks elected to go with Mike Budenholzer as head coach and made a series of personnel decisions. One of the less heralded ones, but now among the most crucial, was getting Korver to re-sign on a four-year, $24 million contract.

It’s also when everything truly started to come together physically and mentally for Korver, who annually moves his family to Santa Barbara for the summer so he can regularly work out at P3. Beyond the continued motion refinement work that was easing the pain in his knee and allowing him to move more freely, a lot of P3’s training work focuses on specific strength and explosiveness improvements tailored not only to your sport, but to the specific role you play within it.

Korver is not a dynamic athlete by NBA standards, but he doesn’t have to be. As Elliott says, given what Korver’s role is, “It doesn’t matter if he can [vertical] jump forty inches. It matters if he can get to twenty-four inches first,” because that’s the height of his jump-shot release, and Korver just needs a fractional amount of space to let fly.
So instead of working to improve Korver’s vertical leap max, Elliott and Korver worked on improving Korver’s vertical “quickness.”

They also worked on pushing the limits of Korver’s mental strength, in part through an annual, one-day exploration of pain called a
misogi,
a type of Japanese purification ritual. Basically, the goal was to come up with a physical challenge that seemed impossible, and then do it in order to push through mental and physical boundaries. In that first summer, Korver, Elliott, and others paddleboarded twenty-seven miles from Santa Barbara to the Channel Islands out in the Pacific Ocean. Korver had never paddleboarded before the attempt, but got through the adventure by micro-focusing on perfecting his strokes while blocking out the fatigue, pain, and potential danger.

In 2014, the
misogi
of choice was an underwater 5K “run,” with the group taking turns picking up an eighty-five-pound rock at the bottom of the ocean, running as far underwater as they could with it, and then dropping it for the next “runner” before surfacing and treading water until it was their turn again. In 2015, the plan was to run repeatedly up a stairwell in a Los Angeles skyscraper until they reached the total vertical height of Mount Everest (29,035 vertical feet), pausing only to take the elevator back down to the ground floor before immediately heading back up the stairs for the next stage of the climb, but Korver was not able to partake because he was recovering from injury.

Overall, Korver says he felt better at thirty-three years old than he did at twenty-three, and the combination of a fitter Korver and the arrival of Budenholzer proved to be extremely potent. As detailed in Lowe’s column, Budenholzer’s designs on a free-flowing, 3-point-heavy attack mapped very well with Korver’s constant needs for movement and tinkering—with some growing pains attached. In their first season together, Korver often would end up freelancing on plays that would wind up with multiple Hawks standing near each other, ruining the set’s spacing. Still, Budenholzer pretty quickly
understood what he had with Korver, and he started crafting creative offshoots of standard NBA actions to best unleash his new weapon with space to operate.

The Hawks started running what approximated as pick and rolls, but included short pitches from the big man setting the screen to Korver rather than Korver initiating the action, since he is not a particularly refined dribbler. The pitch instead of a handoff or Korver having to dribble himself sometimes provided Korver with enough space to immediately squeeze off a catch-and-shoot three, but over time, Korver also has built improvements into his game that allow him to take a dribble or two off that action and find a pass (back to the screener or kicking out to the other wing) or even pull up in the lane for an occasional floater.

When opponents started sniffing out these actions, the Hawks then started running counters to them, often involving a smaller guard in the post and/or Korver actually setting a screen to help unsettle the defense before the main action ended up being run. And he kept burying shots, making 47.2 percent of 392 3-point attempts while bumping up his 2-point field goal percentage a bit and also getting to the free throw line a touch more often, where he made himself into a 90-plus percent shooter. He wasn’t
the
key to the Hawks’ 2013–14 offense, but he was a guy opponents quickly realized they absolutely had to start keying on.

“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,” said Boston Celtics head coach Brad Stevens. “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, as we all know.”

A good part of Korver’s excellence comes from his rigorous pre-game routines. He says he’s not superstitious about what he does to get
ready for games, but he continuously tinkers with his regimen to best prepare him for the types of movements and shots he’s going to get in a game.

Each game night, Korver was assigned to be in the final pregame shooting block, and had half of the court to himself. Before he stepped onto the floor, he would undertake a lengthy stretching and movement routine, using a variety of poles, exercise bands, and advertising signage boards to work through a series of muscle-loosening, static stretches, and resistance movements before he even takes a shot. He then spends the remainder of the period going through a sequence of plays that attempt to simulate where he will get the ball in games and what options he will have.

So, Korver will come full speed off curls, catch inside the arc, and drive for a layup. He’ll use the same motion and pull up for a floater. He’ll shoot some free throws. He’ll take some catch-and-shoot threes from the corner. He’ll interact with multiple coaches to set and receive screens, and simulate pick and rolls and pitches to him, finding his range with one sweet arc after another. Everything is done with pace and purpose, mimicking how the Hawks want to play, and this sets Korver up for another night of relentless movement and catch and shoots off the dead run that stretch and bend even the better NBA defenses in really uncomfortable ways.

“We were talking about it before [the game],” said New Orleans Pelicans wing Ryan Anderson, himself a quality 3-point shooter, after losing to the Hawks in Atlanta. “Ninety percent of their plays could end with an opportunity for him to score, so even though the ball’s not in his hands, he’s always a threat.

“You have to watch out for screens. There’s some guys like Ray Allen, Reggie Miller, guys in history . . . those guys commanded as much attention as him. There’s not a lot of guys [like that] anymore, guys coming off screens looking for a shot, guys always active coming off pindowns, or guys in transition you always have to be aware of. That’s dangerous in this league now because it’s [about] such
stretched-out offense. You want to get those quick buckets, and you can really hurt a team with those huge dagger threes.”

In Korver’s second season under Budenholzer, with big man Al Horford back in the fold and other Hawks like Jeff Teague and DeMarre Carroll blossoming around him, he stretched the limits of NBA history, nearly becoming the first player to have a “50–50–90” field goal percentage–3-point percentage–free throw percentage season. (Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr actually reached that summit in the 1995–96 season, but didn’t make enough field goals or free throws for it to “officially” count.)