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

by Andy Glockner

  Then, as a junior, he upped his minutes even further and vastly increased his usage rates again, as he became the primary offensive option for an NCAA tournament team in 2010–11. Carrying a heavy possession load of above 25 percent, Vucevic still converted 54 percent of his 2-point attempts, became a legitimate 3-point threat (making 35 percent of his eighty-three tries that season), and continued to inhale rebounds, especially to close out opponent possessions. He finished twenty-first in Division I that season, with a defensive rebounding rate of 26 percent. Over his three seasons, his shotblocking rates increased slightly year-over-year, as well.

  Vucevic declared for the draft after that season and was picked sixteenth overall by the Philadelphia 76ers, playing one season for them before being included in the disastrous Andrew Bynum trade, with Vucevic’s rights going to the Orlando Magic. Vucevic made 208 starts for Orlando over his first three seasons there, and was developing into a very productive NBA big man, with the same types of strengths—efficient, high-usage scoring, and defensive rebounding—that he displayed in college. In his first three campaigns with the Magic, Vucevic never shot worse than 50.7 percent from the field, and he averaged between 8.1 and 9.1 defensive rebounds per thirty-six minutes.

  In 2014–15, taking advantage of more touches in better spots thanks to some of the spread pick-and-roll sets Orlando figured out made best use of its personnel, Vucevic posted his highest-ever offensive efficiency rating (a 109), offensive box plus-minus (the first time he’d ever been in positive territory in that category), and a PER that equates to a very good NBA first option. The Magic’s offense fell off by nearly three points per one hundred possessions when he was on the bench, a figure just below that of Elfrid Payton and Victor Oladipo, the team’s starting guards. Vucevic’s frontcourt teammates weren’t surprised.

  “First, he just needs to stay healthy. Other than that, he can do whatever he wants. He’s a [expletive] monster. Good gracious, almighty,” teammate Channing Frye said. “I think for us, we just have to give him the room to operate and make sure we’re running sets for him, but I told him ‘You’re going to get tired getting that ball.’ I’m OK with me shooting one shot and he shoots ninety. For us to win, we have to continue to feed him and go to him. We need to work through him.”

  The defensive end has been more of a struggle. With expanded minutes and offensive responsibility on the offensive end, Vucevic posted a career-worst 106 defensive rating in 2014–15, per Basketball-Reference.com, and he was middle of the road in overall on/off splits because of the relative defensive weakness. According to Nylon Calculus’s Seth Partnow, who calculated estimated “points saved” for big man rim protectors for the 2014–15 season, Vucevic was toward the bottom of the league with a 53.7 percent field goal percentage allowed around the rim, and a -1.25 points saved rate that put him below so-so defenders like Greg Monroe and uncomfortably in the proximity of porous Oklahoma City Thunder big man Enes Kanter. Part of this is Orlando never really figured out the right big man to pair with Vucevic—Frye helped space the court, but the defense was poor; Kyle O’Quinn (who moved to the Knicks in the summer of 2015) was better defensively but more limited on the other end; and small ball with Tobias Harris wasn’t sustainable over huge minutes, either.

  So, yes, Vucevic still has some flaws, especially at the defensive end, but should it be a surprise that what he showed offensively in college is panning out in the pros? If you believe independent research, it shouldn’t be.

  In 2009, Jon Nichols, now part of the analytics team for the Cleveland Cavaliers but at the time a writer for Basketball-Statistics.com, posted a piece where he ran some simple correlations on different stats categories for successful college players who went on to make the NBA. He discovered that shotblocking rates were the stat that translated from college to pro the best, with a full 92 percent of a player’s NBA shotblocking explained by his performance in that category at the college level. Similarly, rebounding had a correlation of 0.8927. Other than assists per minute, no other stat category was all that close to shotblocking and rebounding as a projectable statistic. A 2015 column from Neil Paine and Zach Bradshaw at FiveThirtyEight suggested that among the most telling individual stats that translate are 2-point shot attempts per minute, offensive rebounding rate, and usage rate. Whichever ones tend to suggest future success, Vucevic was delivering in them at the college level.

  That said, even Vucevic knows he’s not yet the finished product in the NBA.

  “I think I’m still early in the process. I have a lot of room to improve. A lot of room to get better,” he said after a game in Brooklyn against the Nets. “I have improved every year I’ve been in the NBA. I’ve added a lot of stuff to my game to help me. I think that playing more years, getting more experience, all the stuff that I do will become easier for me. I’m still early into my career, so I have a lot of room to grow.

  “You see playing all of these games against different guys, you see what you did well, you see the takeaways of what you can add onto that,” he added about how he’s gone about improving his game. “A countermove or something. A lot of it is just you watch other players against whom you play, and if you like something they do, you try and see how you like it. A lot of it is just trying and getting a feel for something and seeing how you like it, if it fits your game and if it helps your team.”

  In a league where a growing premium is put on bigs who can face up and shoot, it was a bit curious that former Magic head coach Jacque Vaughn never fully explored pushing Vucevic occasionally out past the 3-point arc, given his junior season numbers at USC and a relatively strong positive correlation between college 3-point percentage and the pros. In his first four NBA seasons, Vucevic has been used mostly as a post scorer, a seemingly lost artifact now in a league with occasional 6-foot-7 “centers” and more-than-occasional slash-and-kick offensive styles that often tend to bypass traditional big men on the block.

  Vucevic, at least during the 2014–15 season, didn’t seem that interested in evolving that part of his game, though.

  “I’m not going to make it a big part of my game, because it would take away from the other stuff that I do,” he said about 3-pointers in a January 2015 interview with Grantland. “But I’m capable. I shoot them pretty well in practice. Maybe I could make it a bigger part of what I do without taking away from other things. Who knows? But playing inside is always going to be my focus. Maybe we can run a play for me to shoot a 3 sometimes, just as a surprise.”

  Vucevic is an interesting test case. It’s not often in the modern era that NBA teams get three seasons (including two as a major contributor) to evaluate a big man with raw talent like his, but his path to college excellence is one worth considering. It also will make the future development of someone like Charlotte Hornets lottery pick Frank Kaminsky, the 2015 college Player of the Year whose college numbers and development trajectory were even more impressive than Vucevic’s, worth watching. The Hornets were widely discussed after the 2015 draft when reports surfaced that they may have declined a package of four current and future first-round picks from the Boston Celtics for the No. 9 spot where they selected Kaminsky.

  Thanks to varying levels of competition and systems to often go with small sample sizes at the college level, translation of production there to the pro game is still a work in progress. Vucevic’s best college performance comparables, according to Ken Pomeroy’s site, were a bunch of mostly nondescript, non-NBA players, while Kaminsky’s are a solid bunch of future NBA pros. One thing seems pretty certain, though: the new 76ers management team likely is angry at its predecessors. Tony DiLeo and his staff saw the potential in Vucevic, but didn’t have the organizational patience or foresight to see it out after his rookie season.

  Channing Frye: Survival Through Evolution

  It’s extremely difficult to make the NBA. It’s even harder to stick around for any length of time. Of the 450 or so players in the league in any given season, maybe 10 percent of them—if even that many—ca
n be considered “stars.” The rest of the league revolves around those players, with each franchise trying to find the proper mix of second bananas and role players to form a cohesive and successful team. As a player, if you’re not going to be a star, you need to very quickly figure out what your primary role is going to be. Those who do can carve out lengthy, lucrative careers.

  Channing Frye is an excellent example. Frye was originally a lottery pick, take No. 8 overall by the New York Knicks in 2005. He had a very credible rookie season, providing 12.3 points and 5.8 rebounds a game in only twenty-four minutes an outing. Frye struggled defensively like many young big men do when they get to the NBA level, but he shot nearly 48 percent from the field and over 82 percent from the free throw line, showing off a nice face-up touch and athleticism on the offensive end, especially considering he had played a more traditional post game in college at Arizona.

  Things went downhill in his second season in New York, as Frye, far from a dominant rebounder or shotblocker at 6-foot-10, was proving to be a poor fit next to groundbound center Eddy Curry. His averages and per-thirty-six rates dropped across the board, with the New York Times writing that Frye “hardly developed in two seasons as a Knick and has been little more than a midrange jump-shooter.” On draft night in 2007, Frye was part of an exchange of problem players with Portland, with disgruntled point guard Steve Francis heading to the Trail Blazers in exchange for rugged power forward Zach Randolph.

  Frye didn’t realize a rebirth in the Rose City, though. In his two seasons in Portland, his minutes and per-game averages continued to wobble, and in his second year there, his shooting percentages dropped below even those of his disappointing sophomore campaign in New York. Now four years into his career, Frye quickly was reaching a crisis point. As a free agent, he signed a two-year, $3.8 million contract with the Phoenix Suns, with the second season a player option. Not that Frye was struggling to make ends meet, but in the first year of his second NBA contract, he was making the lowest salary of his career. That’s not the way things are supposed to work, and Frye knew things had to change. He was willing to adapt to save his NBA viability.

  In Phoenix, Frye morphed into an early prototype of the “stretch” bigs who are now so profoundly important to offensive spacing in today’s NBA. In his first season with the Suns, Frye made an astounding 172 3-pointers (after making just 11 the previous season in Portland) while shooting 43.9 percent from the arc, which was the sixth-best success rate in the league that season.

  “When I was in college, I was a post-up guy,” Frye said. “Came to the league and figured out that just wasn’t going to ride, so I started to develop other parts of my game. So it’s a combination of what team you’re on, and what the coaches want you to develop, and what you can do on a nightly basis.”

  Where once his specific skill set was considered a weakness, he worked with the staff in Phoenix to extend what he was good at, with profound results.

  “I think you kind of see it,” Frye said about what parts of his game were going to continue to work, and what he needed to develop in order to stay effective. “Certain things for me, it was like ‘face up and shoot a jumper,’ and then over the course of the year, they put smaller guys on me, and then they put bigger guys on me. And then it was like, ‘OK, how can I continue to be effective, drawing the guy away from the hoop and going farther and farther back?’ And finally in Phoenix, they were like ‘We want you to shoot this. This is the shot. Practice this. This is what you’re looking for.’ So I just developed into what I am now.

  “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

  The 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 exercis
e.

  “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].