“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 extend
ed 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.”
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.
Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion Page 23
