A sort of sociological question: clutch, choker... we all know it’s a fable we tell ourselves, right?

[TheGeneral99]

Yeah I mean generally speaking narratives play a big role and some players have bad luck.

But there are some ones that hold based on larger sample sizes.

You see guys like Kawhi, Luka, Lebron, Steph etc. that always seem to elevate themselves in the playoffs.

[pipfan]

There is totally a trait of being clutch

When I was younger, even into my 20's, I got nervous at the end of the game-even in heated pick up games. As I got older (I still play relatively competitive ball at 57) I now really want the ball on game point-I love it.

For me, when I was a "choker", it was physical-the adrenaline rush would make me jittery. Once I got over it, I felt more focused at the end of the game-concentrating on making the right play and wanting to be the "hero".

Clutch/Choker is DEFINITELY a thing in the NBA too-but narratives do get slanted

[Handlez]

Not a fable at all.

Humans are human.

Some perform better under pressure than others.

Some have panic attacks like me lol

[threethehardway]

Are you serious?

I am deadly serious. There's a major class dynamic to team sports.

The elite and powerful don't sit around all day and debate sports. They have better things to do. They aren't die hard fans of grown men that play for a living. They are not holding close their father's favorite team. They don't say "We" when talking about their favorite sports team.

They don't even play the same type of team sports that the lower and middle classes play. They play cricket, polo, golf, tennis, lacrosse and row crew.

The kids of the rich and powerful are not grooming being groomed to play American football or be an MMA fighter or a boxer. Those are sports for the less fortunate to give each other brain damage.

Sports fanaticism is middle class cope. It's designed to be as milquetoast as possible for the maximum amount of entertainment that can be sustainable for the middle and lower classes yet aspirational.

That's why you got office workers adopting mamba mentality after Kobe died. You got Tim Grover getting thousands upon thousands dollars to talk about training Michael Jordan to mindless corporate drones.

There's a multitude of better things to do than to watch rich athletes run around for 2 hours. There are better things to do than to watch rich so called journalists yell at each other about who is the best player in the NBA. Or podcasters talk about the 25 best players ever for the 20th time.

There's a reason why ESPN is scheduled around the working day of a desk jockey, the underemployed, and the unemployed. It's so they can waste their time with narratives that are vapid and yield nothing substantial.

In fact, I think the world would be better off without professional sports because it's obviously just a narrative machine and no longer about the celebration of peak physical human performance at the heights of competition.

Sports is an entertainment business that is designed to waste the time of middle class people and unite them into national narratives that are vague, amorphous and meaningless - especially in America.

I mean...why you think the Saudis are all of a sudden interested in the business of professional sports, it's meant to waste a citizenry's capability to derive meaning from public life by creating the dumbest narratives possible. What is a better and more peaceful way to subdue the imagination of a people?

[meekrab]

[NZB2323]

This just isn’t true. Look at how many game winning shots Robert Horry has made.
Embiid also scored 17.6 ppg against the Raptors on 37% shooting and has never made the conference finals. When Tatum dropped 51 points on Embiid in game 7 on 74.6 TS% Embiid had 15 points on 36.3 TS%. Harden had 9 points on 37.9 TS%.

The point OP is making is that Horry could've easily missed those shots. We all know that there is definitely a HUGE luck component in any single shot, and it makes sense that Horry hitting all those shots was at least partially luck. They were good shots and he was a solid shooter, but if he we ran a simulation 100 times he definitely wouldn't hit all those game winners every time.

The point other people are making is that there's a difference between a quite small sample of open shots like Horry made, and a larger pattern of players just not playing very well in big games AND against certain defensive looks made to slow them down.

I'd also add my little Philly fan thing that Embiid's struggles are both real and consistently overstated by non-Philly fans. He definitely struggles to score when he absolutely has to, meaning in the 4th quarter and in big possessions against a locked-in defense. But he's also actually been very good in meaningful series overall in his career in the past 5 years, doing a ton of damage earlier in games. E.g. here you're only citing him against the Raptors--and skipping closeout games the year before or after against BOS, over which he posted like 30/12 on great efficiency. And he put up a v efficient 39/13 in his last closeout game vs NYK too. Overall in PO series that mattered (e.g. not first rd cakewalks), Embiid has averaged well over 30/12 on good efficiency. Again his struggles are real but the narrative of him as a dude who disappears in the PO wasn't quite right.

There isn’t a HUGE luck component when Horry keeps on hitting game winning shot after game winning shot. Sure, if you replayed those scenarios 100 times out of 100 he wouldn’t hit them all 100 times, but he came through again and again and again when he’s a role player that teams didn’t run plays for in game winning shots.

Embiid’s playoff struggles may be exaggerated, but they’re still there. 28.2 PER for the regular season and 22.2 PER for the playoffs.

[benson13]

Embiid is a loser because Kawhi’s Hail Mary went in.
Harden is a loser because of a Game 7 against the Warriors where his team went an inexplicable -and unrepeatable- 7/44 from three. He shot a miserable 2/13, but Trevor Ariza missed every shot he took (including twos), and Eric Gordon went 2/12. I get that James is the one to blame the most as he was the MVP, but still: it was the perfect storm, but in reverse.

This isn’t a defense of Harden or Embiid as I don’t particularly like either of them.
And of course, there are recurring patterns we can spot in players who seem to perform better or worse at the highest stakes.
-Although there's a in-depth study I once read that concluded that "clutch" is a construct that basically doesn't exist-.

I just wonder if, deep down, we all know and accept that these narratives are part of the drama and excitement of sports. But we also know they’re conventions that doesn't describe reality.

The player who makes or misses a buzzer beater is the exact same player. Making it or not doesn’t make him clutch or a choker. Some shots drop, others don’t.
Agree?

Like in a lot of other areas, it's fun to create a narrative. My favorite is when a player shoots poorly all game then decides to step it up and make a big shot at the end, as if they weren't trying the whole game or something.

James Harden is 100% a choker though. He's the epitome of a guy figuring out how to make things work but has no backup plan if they fail. In the playoffs the level of preparation goes up. When Harden's step back wasn't falling and flailing drives weren't drawing fouls he just doubled down on it and kept going. Kobe Bryant, for all his faults, would go post up, move without the ball, or do anything else to get himself going when he had a bad shooting night. Harden was either incapable or unwilling to do that. That's why I always chuckle when Rockets fans claim they were a Chris Paul injury away from beating the Warriors. Harden couldn't deal with defenses that were adapting to him in a seven game series.

[Rubios]

The point OP is making is that Horry could've easily missed those shots. We all know that there is definitely a HUGE luck component (...)

Exactly! Thank you.

Of course, people respond in different ways to pressure (internal and/or environmental) and decisive moments.

But even for elite shooters, and during the lower stress of the regular season, the variability of whether a contested 2 or an open 3 goes in is very close to flipping a coin.

The law of large numbers tells us that if a player shoots 40% from three, and takes 1000 shots, his makes will converge toward 400 with fairly good accuracy.
But the statistical distribution is not a uniform repetition of a sequence of 4 in/6 out.

In a playoff series, a single game, the last 3 minutes, and certainly the final play, pure luck is probably the most decisive factor.

[Blame Rasho]

Some people wilt under pressure… others make love to pressure.

[NoStatsGuy]

harden choked way more often than that one game. but im with you on embiid. he played with simmons, who has mental issues, he had doc rivers as coach, didnt click with jimmy and to this day, the raptors chip is one of the luckiest chips ever, that i have seen in my lifetime. I dont exactly know if embiid is fully cleared, but i dont see him as a "choker". Paul George on the other hand....

I might do not have every clousout game from philly in my mind right now, but did embiid dissapear in any close out games? i mean except the ones he played on one leg, i'll give him a pass for that.

[threethehardway]

Like in a lot of other areas, it's fun to create a narrative. My favorite is when a player shoots poorly all game then decides to step it up and make a big shot at the end, as if they weren't trying the whole game or something.

James Harden is 100% a choker though. He's the epitome of a guy figuring out how to make things work but has no backup plan if they fail. In the playoffs the level of preparation goes up. When Harden's step back wasn't falling and flailing drives weren't drawing fouls he just doubled down on it and kept going. Kobe Bryant, for all his faults, would go post up, move without the ball, or do anything else to get himself going when he had a bad shooting night. Harden was either incapable or unwilling to do that. That's why I always chuckle when Rockets fans claim they were a Chris Paul injury away from beating the Warriors. Harden couldn't deal with defenses that were adapting to him in a seven game series.

And this is the narrative building I am talking about.


A player that is defended effectively isn't a choker. James Harden.

All players have limits to their abilities, which is why it is a team sport.

A player is defended in the context of operating in as a team.

James Harden's playoff struggles is because his teams were offensively stunted outside of him. They had few creators.

He developed his offensive game to be absolutely unguardable one on one, which makes the opposing team have to put 2 on the ball. That's why getting another MVP caliber like Chris Paul was important, you can't aimlessly double him now.

James Harden's coaches don't have a response to James being doubled other than swing the ball. Since James is such a devasting iso-player, his teams are slow in pace.

Harden's issue, like Embiid's issue, is that they can't process the game fast enough to create consistent high leverage plays out of a double team. If your the pace of your team is slow and spaced out with very little motion because the objective is to spread a defense out and attack mismatched, your offense as team isn't resilient.

Steve Kerr's solution to a Steph Curry double is making Draymond the defacto PG and not creating an offense around Curry's iso game. The Warrior's adopted a defense first strategy and a fast break first offense and deploy Curry as an off-ball threat. Most of the prime Warriors legendary 3rd quarter runs was created by defense and in the chaos of transition.

Harden on the Nets was the best player. It was the first time he was allowed to be a point guard and on an offensively talented roster. Injuries and covid craziness happened.

Coaches decide on how a player is deployed which dictates how the player's game is developed. Kobe didn't create his game in a vacuum. Kobe played in the triangle. Harden is combo guard, that played in slow 4-out and 5-out offenses that relied on his offensive dominance on the perimeter, at the top of the key, to create disadvantages that leads into corner 3 and rim pressure.

And his style and how he was deployed, led him to be one of the greatest creators of all time and you think if he did some posts up and every now and then, he wouldn't be a choker...

[sashaturiaf]

Absolutely ridiculous take. The mental side is a large part of sports especially at the highest levels.

[Lalouie]

Are you serious?

I am deadly serious. There's a major class dynamic to team sports.

The elite and powerful don't sit around all day and debate sports. They have better things to do. They aren't die hard fans of grown men that play for a living. They are not holding close their father's favorite team. They don't say "We" when talking about their favorite sports team.

They don't even play the same type of team sports that the lower and middle classes play. They play cricket, polo, golf, tennis, lacrosse and row crew.

The kids of the rich and powerful are not grooming being groomed to play American football or be an MMA fighter or a boxer. Those are sports for the less fortunate to give each other brain damage.

Sports fanaticism is middle class cope. It's designed to be as milquetoast as possible for the maximum amount of entertainment that can be sustainable for the middle and lower classes yet aspirational.

That's why you got office workers adopting mamba mentality after Kobe died. You got Tim Grover getting thousands upon thousands dollars to talk about training Michael Jordan to mindless corporate drones.

There's a multitude of better things to do than to watch rich athletes run around for 2 hours. There are better things to do than to watch rich so called journalists yell at each other about who is the best player in the NBA. Or podcasters talk about the 25 best players ever for the 20th time.

There's a reason why ESPN is scheduled around the working day of a desk jockey, the underemployed, and the unemployed. It's so they can waste their time with narratives that are vapid and yield nothing substantial.

In fact, I think the world would be better off without professional sports because it's obviously just a narrative machine and no longer about the celebration of peak physical human performance at the heights of competition.

Sports is an entertainment business that is designed to waste the time of middle class people and unite them into national narratives that are vague, amorphous and meaningless - especially in America.

I mean...why you think the Saudis are all of a sudden interested in the business of professional sports, it's meant to waste a citizenry's capability to derive meaning from public life by creating the dumbest narratives possible. What is a better and more peaceful way to subdue the imagination of a people?

its not only sports... its LIFE

being able to deliver on a job when needed. this is why many people, many companies, manny editors/directors etc etc hire based on resume and experience. they need people who deliver.

the difference in sports is that the results are immediate