Kyle Korver's recipe for thriving in basketball's ecosystem

Finding your niche in an ecosystem
Q: How do you beat Bobby Fischer?
A: Play him at anything but chess.
Charlie Munger is famous for asking and answering that question. He has (well, he claims to have) built a career on doing just such a thing. Define your circle of competence—find out what you know and what you don’t—and then only play where you have an advantage. Do that, avoid mistakes and stupidity, and you’re off to the races.
You don’t have to be brilliant to be successful. But it helps to figure out what you’re good at doing, and then confining your activity as much as possible to realms where you won’t be prone to making many errors.
I’m not going to kill myself to get mediocre
Atlanta Hawks basketball player Kyle Korver is easy to root for—girls love him, he’s a great guy, comes from a good family, he works hard to improve, and so genuinely cares for the communities he’s lived and worked in that one team’s community relations manager cried upon learning of his departure. He also embodies the ethos of Munger’s ‘play Fischer at anything but chess’ as well as just about anyone.

Kyle Korver may be beautiful, but not as beautiful as his release.

Realizing that the NBA is a pick-and-roll league, and confronted with the reality that his (relative) limitations in terms of quickness and athleticism keep him from excelling the league average for players at his position in the pick-and-roll game, Korver tried a different tack. His response is right out of Munger’s playbook: “I’m not going to kill myself to get mediocre at that. I want to find things I can be really good at in the system we run.”

Finding one’s niche in an ecosystem

Figuring out what you’re good at can be tricky. If you’re LeBron James, for example, it turns out that the universe of your possibilities on a basketball court is pretty unlimited. Whether as a result of his unprecedented physical ability, or his incredible mental acumen, LeBron is good at a lot.[i]

If you’re Kyle Korver, though, finding your niche is a little tougher. Two recent wildly interesting pieces by Zach Lowe illustrate how Korver has forged a remarkably successful career in the incredibly tough ecosystem of professional basketball, despite being overlooked and underutilized at several stops.[ii]

Now, as a result of his ability to find his niche, Korver has been invited to play for the U.S. Senior national team and is a good bet to make the final roster.

Kyle Korver and the U.S. Men's National Basketball Team

 

Bigger isn’t always better

Sometimes, famous businessman Charlie Munger argues, it’s just the reverse. Machiavelli famously was the first to postulate that, in statecraft, sometimes being the wily, agile (and smaller) fox was better than being the bigger, stronger lion.

While I doubt anyone—well, anyone who is interested in fielding a competitive NBA basketball team and not in getting a date with an Ashton Kucher look-alike heartthrob—would select Korver before LeBron, Korver has come to resemble Machiavelli’s fox in many respects. Munger provides some insight into what makes this kind of transformation possible.

Munger tells the following story in the context of the advantages and disadvantages of scale.  Several years ago when Berkshire Hathaway was the largest shareholder in Capital Cities/ABC. ABC  “had trade publications there that got murdered—where our competitors beat us. And the way they beat us was by going to a narrower specialization.”

The story is familiar to everyone who knows Munger’s work well. It comes from one of his most famous speeches, On Worldly Wisdom. His arguments are interesting.

“We’d have a travel magazine for business travel. So somebody would create one, which was addressed solely at corporate

travel departments. Like an ecosystem, you are getting a narrower and narrower specialization.

“Well, they got much more efficient. They could tell more to the guys who ran corporate travel departments. Plus, they didn’t

have to waste the ink and paper mailing out stuff that corporate travel departments were not interested in reading. It was a more

efficient system. And they beat our brains out as we relied on our broader magazine.

“That is what happened to the Saturday Evening Post and all those things. They’re gone. What we have now is Motor Cross—

which is read by a bunch of nuts who like to participate in tournaments where they turn somersaults on their motorcycles. But they

CARE about it. For them, it is the principle purpose of life. A magazine called Motor cross is a total necessity to those people. And

its profit margins would make you salivate.

“Just think of how narrowcast that kind of publishing is. So occasionally, scaling down and intensifying gives you the big advantage.”

Basketball’s Evolving Ecosystem

Grantland’s Kirk Goldsberry is among the forefront of writers and thinkers who characterize the NBA as an ecosystem in the way Munger has in mind. Whether you’re inclined to agree with his assessment of what that means for players like Monta Ellis, or are persuaded by counterarguments by smart people like blogger Jeff Fogle, thinking of basketball as an ecosystem can yield the kinds of insights that Munger has gleaned by applying the ecosystem mental model to stock-picking.
Take Korver, for example. The stuff the Atlanta Hawks let Korver do is far different than what he was allowed to do when he entered the league as a rookie for Philadelphia. Despite Korver’s reputation as one of college’s premier marksmen, Randy Ayers, the 76’ers head coach at the time, preferred Korver to ply a midrange game and get to the basket before shooting from long range.
Lowe describes the change what Korver’s team expected of him when the 76’ers fired Ayers and replaced him with Jim O’Brien:

“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.”

Stats LLC, the company that makes the increasingly ubiquitous SportVU cameras, developed a couple new measures of how much attention NBA defenders pay an offensive player when he doesn’t have the ball.
Korver, not surprisingly, does very well in both. On the ‘gravity score,’ which measures how often defenders continue to guard a player when one of his teammates has the ball, Korver was forth in the league. He ranked behind only Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, and Paul George. Durant and Anthony are two of the best scorers of their generation, and George is becoming a great scorer who is really the only guy on his team capable of creating his own shot. That Korver tops the entire league except these three is amazing.
On the ‘distraction score,’ which measures how often a player’s defender leaves him to pay attention to another player (presumably usually one with the ball), Korver registered the lowest score in the league. No player in the league was able to keep the guy guarding him from helping his teammates than Korver. Well, at least no player was able to do so while he didn’t have the ball.
These numbers surprised even Korver’s coach, who Zach Lowe cites as saying, “I underestimated how much attention he gets from defenses. You don’t appreciate it until you see it every day.” Lowe rightly surmises that, “Korver is almost an offense unto himself.”
Adapt or Die & the Lollapalooza Effect
It’s obviously hard for each of us to figure out what we’re good at and how to cultivate our skills and abilities so that we can take advantage of the ecosystem we find ourselves in (or to find a different ecosystem entirely!).
Korver as a case study is probably most instructive, to us who aren’t blessed with a great jump shot and the physical ability and stature to get shots off against some of the world’s greatest athletes, in terms of his attitude.
Interestingly, Korver’s success wasn’t just a result of the way he was used; it was more than the basketball ecosystem that had evolved around him. Reading Lowe’s pieces makes clear that his coaches in Atlanta, head coach Mike Budenholzer and advisor Quin Snyder (who has since become head coach of the Utah Jazz) were open to developing new ways to use his talents. Equally important, though, is Korver’s ability and willingness to adapt himself.
““Kyle’s unique in the sense that players his age who have had success aren’t usually open to trying new things,” says Snyder. “It makes them uncomfortable.”
Sloan amplified the sentiment, saying, “Most guys just stay the same after they’ve been in the league 10 years.”
He’s always had that willingness to learn.

Consider another Lowe piece, on the advice shooting guru, erstwhile Jazz assistant coach and current Suns head coach Jeff Hornacek gave Korver. Lowe writes:

“Hornacek eventually shared one of his shooting secrets with Korver: As Hornacek wound up to shoot, he zeroed in on a tiny speck of the rim, and then aimed to shoot the ball just over that speck. The location of the speck changed with every shot, depending on where Hornacek was on the floor.

This struck Korver as insane, and maybe impossible. Lots of players target a general area of the rim. Some guys home in on the front of the rim and try to launch the ball just over it. Others direct their gaze at the back of the rim and aim just short of it.

But to find a tiny fleck of orange — to actually find one, every time — seemed implausible. ‘I was like, ‘My eyes are not that good, dude. I need to get my eyes checked.’

That sounds like an expression, but Korver actually went and got his eyes checked. ‘I’m serious, man,’ he says now. ‘I actually went to a doctor.’

His vision is fine.”

So is his attitude. And his combination of work ethic, desire to improve, and willingness to change, along with changes in the game he plays and in the coaches he has have contributed to a lollapalooza effect that have Korver thriving in his niche in a tough ecosystem.

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[i] Even LeBron, though, has had to evolve.

[ii] Lowe notes that, despite going 38-12 after getting Korver in exchange for Gordan Giricek and a draft pick, the Utah Jazz let him go after drafting Gordon Hayward. Lowe cites former Utah Jazz head coach Jerry Sloan as saying, “We loved him, but when we drafted Hayward, that cut down on his value here.” Coaches matter. Coach and analyst David Thorpe is fond of saying the first order of business in running a team would be to hire smartest guy you can find, send him on a one-year scouting expedition to find the best coach in the world then hire him. He’ll make all your personnel moves love smarter.

Sloan is a great coach. One of the best ever. His offense’s efficiency ratings are incredible. When you consider the personnel he had to work with, it’s even more remarkable.

But many wonder if the Jazz’s failure—and Sloan’s old school reluctance—to embrace the kinds of efficient scoring opportunities that the Spurs or the Houston Rockets have cultivated offenses have held the Jazz organization back. I’m not so sure. I do think, though, that swapping Hayward for Korver is an example of, if not failing to learn Machiavelli’s lion and the fox lesson, at least presents a significant downside from an efficiency standpoint. Hayward is certainly the more impressive physical specimen. He can certainly do more things than Korver. Hayward is more athletic; he’s younger, and, for a time at least, worked on a cheaper contract. But he certainly doesn’t have that singular talent that nearly perfectly fills a very important niche in the ecosystem of contemporary basketball.

Consider: last year, Korver made 47.2 percent of his 3s. He shot 58 percent on ‘stationary 3s,’ which means that when he shots after catching a pass when his feet are more or less set behind the three-point line, each of his shots produce about 1.75 points. That means a Korver stationary three-pointer is worth more than just about any shot that isn’t a dunk. Hayward experienced some growing pains last year, shooting just better than 30 percent on three-pointers. Hayward, as Utah’s lead offensive option, only managed to get off 3.6 three-pointers per game, meaning that Korver’s made almost as many as Hayward took. And the latter’s 2.6 makes per game dwarf the former’s 1.1. 

Of course, Dennis Lindsay, Kevin O’Connor and the rest of the team’s decision makers’ (tough to pin this one on Sloan, who is so competitive, I can’t imagine him signing off on anything even remotely resembling a tanking effort) realization that Korver would have kept them too competitive to bottom out, secure perhaps the most valuable commodity for a small market team—especially one located in Utah—a high lottery draft pick probably had as much to do with letting Korver go as any misevaluation of his talent. I’ll bet the Jazz knew what they had in Korver (hiring free-thinking  Quin Snyder instead of returning to Sloan who has recently expressed quite a bit of interest in returning to the bench indicates they’d likely embrace the kind of defense-bending three-point shooting that Korver provides), but wanted instead to lose games and unload players that might take Hayward’s playing time.