Some players have it, other players don’t.
Some believe it can be acquired from years of heartbreak and suffering, but most tend to believe you’re just born with it. Or not.
If you’re a fan of any professional sport — or a coach, executive or owner for that matter — you’d want all of your players to have that “killer instinct”. You know, take no prisoners, show no mercy, ready to step on an opponents throat at a moment’s notice and the like. Nobody wants a player whose heart pumps Kool-Aid. But when evaluating players, especially when leading up to the NBA Draft, general managers and scouts are forced to try to identify and quantify this specific intangible characteristic within each player and weigh it into their selection process.
How do you identify it? Well, it could be defined as one of those things that you know when you see it. Usually though, it’s uttered by one person on television, and is subsequently attached to that player until the end of time.
“Kobe Bryant is a killer!”
“Michael Jordan was a killer!!!”
These are the types of phrases you’ll commonly hear tossed around any argument between people who A) claim they know basketball and B) are living in the year 2014. Perhaps even more damming than the application of this title to a young prospect is its omission from said prospect’s scouting report.
One of the biggest knocks you’ll find on Kansas swingman Andrew Wiggins entering Thursday’s draft is that he’s not “a killer”. It is largely responsible for the perceived drop of Wiggins’ stock to as low as third overall (I know, it’s relative, but stick with me) despite the fact that Wiggins was considered the NBA draft’s greatest prize since LeBron as recently as eight months ago (which were ludicrous expectations he never asked for).
I’ve already heard on national sports talk radio that Wiggins “isn’t a killer”…and it sickens me.
It’s the type of short-sighted, buzz-word, barbershop analysis that surpassed colloquial basketball vernacular long ago and has now seeped into the consciousness of the casual fan, much like almost any talk about “clutch gene”, “alpha dog” and “legacy”.
“Player X is a killer”?? What does that mean exactly?
Over the last 20-25 years of NBA hoops, the “killer” moniker is associated most closely with Bryant and Jordan. Jordan, of course, laid the 1990’s blueprint for the superstar shooting guard who will not hesitate to take the majority of a team’s shots, particularly in crunch time. Kobe, who obviously patterned his entire game after His Airness, is a hyperactive Jordan— a guy who so knows the game that he seemingly had YouTube in his brain before YouTube ever hit your computer screen, and therefore has LIVED to emulate all of Micheal’s late game heroics. This is one of the primary examples of how Michael Jordan has destroyed the game of basketball.
Sidebar: I say “the game of basketball” because Jordan never just says “basketball”, it’s always “the game of basketball”. Therefore a large portion of today’s players always say “the game of basketball” when referencing basketball. I find the whole thing humorous.
Jordan has hit a ton of game-winners over the years, many of them in the playoffs. It’s a big part of why we all view Michael Jordan as MICHAEL JORDAN. But it should be noted that MJ didn’t make every game-winner he ever took, no matter how much Generation X’ers and older Millennials would try to convince you otherwise.
The spawn of this brand of basketball is Kobe Bryant. Jordan’s revered “killer” mentality clearly rubbed off on the kid from Lower Merion High School. The result? Kobe taking virtually EVERY single game-winning shot attempt for the Lakers over the last 15 years! Sure, Bryant has made an impossible number of clutch shots in his career, but it’s more a function of his unwavering willingness to shoot the rock…BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY!
What do you see when you look at this reel? How many of these shots were off-balance? How many were 25 ft from the basket? Here I see a man who appears to be far more interested in taking shots over two, or sometimes three defenders, rather than making the more intelligent basketball play of passing to open teammates.
And why is Kobe being doubled and tripled on many of these final shots???
Because everybody in the gym KNOWS he’s taking the shot! And there’s NO consequence for this defensive alignment! Kobe, being the “killer” that he is, refuses to penalize the defense for their plan of attack. Instead, he welcomes the extra defenders as if he’s playing his own game of Horse with the real game hanging in the balance.
Understand: this video ain’t just the work of a guy with selective memory and an axe to grind, the numbers actually bare this out. Kobe Bryant is an incredibly overrated clutch performer in both the regular season and the playoffs. And the data indicates he’s far less reliable in crunch time than LeBron James, the poster child for not being “a killer”.
The “passive” James came into the league as a willing distributor; the “assertive” Bryant came into the league a willing shooter. Thus far in his career, James has: made two game-winning baskets in his first ever playoff series, authored the epic Game 5 in Detroit in 2007 (which also featured a game-winner in the closing seconds), buried a three-pointer at the buzzer with his team down two against Orlando in the 2009 conference finals, dropped 45 on the Celtics in Boston to force a Game 7 (which his team eventually won) in the 2012 conference finals AND hung 37 and 12 on the Spurs in GAME 7 OF THE FINALS last year. Yet here we are more than a decade later and James still can’t shake the “non-killer” label.
Sidebar: A label that apparently all the great players in the league either have or don’t have. There is no in between.
Kobe “The Killer” on the other had has not only been outperformed by James in virtually every crunch time metric, but he’s also responsible for his career .410 shooting percentage in the Finals, he missed a game-winner in the ’09 Finals vs. Orlando when he attempted to go through three defenders, he had the meltdown vs. the Pistons in ’04 where he finally said “enough is enough” and wrestled the team away from Shaquille O’Neal, had blowout loses to Phoenix (the infamous Kobe quit in the second half game) and in the ’08 Finals against the Celtics, AND “The Airball Party” in Utah during his rookie year.
James boasts the highest point per game average when facing playoff elimination in NBA history, but Kobe is the “killer”, LeBron is coward, even a choker to some.
The point of this column is not to trash Kobe and praise LeBron. Rather, it’s to call attention to just how ridiculous the talk around the NBA Draft can be. Kobe Bean and King James are the perceived extremes in the “killer” vs. “non-killer” debate, but we know these labels are nothing more than an invention of the media, perpetuated by the biases or ignorance of hoop fans, players, coaches and even executives (as explained in the LeBron link above).
Some feel Andrew Wiggins isn’t worthy of being the #1 pick…because he’s not a “killer”.
And yet, THIS is the reason why pundits are down on Andrew Wiggins! They call out the 19-year-old for not being the “killer” that he should be — with many citing his 1-6, four-point performance in a loss against Standford in the NCAA Tournament — while completely ignoring the fact Wiggins averaged 28.0 per game in his four previous outings, and averaged 17.1 a night (which is the rough equivalent of 20+ per game in the pros) as a freshman, which led the team. His counterpart at the top of the draft, Jabari Parker, never had a problem with earning the “killer” label. In fact, some of the scouting reports on Parker will tell you he may even try to do too much offensively.
So this is where we are. You either average 14.3 FGAs per game and you’re “doing too much”, or you’re averaging 12.1 FGAs per game and you’re not a “killer”. One major difference between the two is Wiggins was an excellent college defender, unlike the under-conditioned and defensively apathetic Parker. Shouldn’t Wiggins’ willingness to compete on both ends count towards his “killer” mentality? Nah, I guess not.
Meanwhile, big guys like Joel Embiid — the alleged lock as the draft’s top pick prior to his inevitable injury, which we totally called on the podcast — tend to get a relative pass on a lot of the murder talk. Embiid averaged less than 12.0 ppg at Kansas, yet nobody questioned his “killer” instinct when he shot to the top of everybody’s mock draft last week. This phenomena appears to almost exclusively apply to wing players, which seems fairly arbitrary until you consider Jordan and Kobe were both wing players.
Andrew Wiggins has been relegated to consolation prize status in this draft for reasons that are still hard to understand. He is an elite athlete and has the ability to excel at the next level offensively and defensively. He’s Paul George with a higher ceiling, still people seem to think he’s some sort of project just because he’s not quite as NBA ready as the ultra-polished Jabari Parker…and because he’s not a “killer”, of course.
Sidebar: Keep in mind, if Wiggins were to go #1 to the Cavaliers, he wouldn’t even be in a position where he needed to be extra aggressive offensively because Cleveland already has assertive guards like Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters on the roster. He would not be afforded this luxury if he goes to Milwaukee of Philly.
Having said all this, I can’t help but wonder: have we learned nothing from the San Antonio Spurs?
You can go a long way in the playoffs for a long time by buying into a team concept and not getting swept up in this “killer” nonsense. Do Duncan, Parker and Ginobili ever get slandered for not being “killers” even though they’re arguably the most unselfish trio of star teammates ever? We praise Kobe for it, but crush Carmelo Anthony for doing the same thing. Some will criticize Kevin Durant’s lack of aggression, but he leads the league in scoring every year. Russell Westbrook moves mountains on the court, but he can’t seem to escape armchair quarterbacks on Twitter for his attacking style. But how often is Westbrook praised for being a “killer”?
Sidebar: If Russ Westbrook ain’t a “killer” on the basketball court, then I don’t know what is.
Media members and fans of the game recklessly place titles like “killer” and “not a killer” on players without any real context or understanding of what it means. Saying a player is a “killer” is meant to be a badge of honor. It’s supposed to highlight their competitive spirit, their love of basketball and emphasize their willingness to score the ball with the game on the line. In actuality, saying a guy is a “killer” only validates selfishness. It gives 19 and 20-year-olds a false sense of what this beautiful game is supposed to be, and consequently gives them a license to play hero ball at a time when their game is most malleable. It corrupts basketball’s elite young players who will one day be accountable for being stewards of the sport.
Jordan set the bar and Kobe hurdled over it, for better or for worse, but it needs to end here. So in the last days leading up to NBA Draft, please remember to give the side-eye to any analyst who uses the term “killer” or any euphemism of the word. It’s just irresponsible.