The psychology of sports can so easily be overrated and overestimated, leading to simplistic conclusions that wind up being very unfair to coaches and players alike.
Kobe Bryant suffered through a terrible Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals, but Pau Gasol and other Los Angeles Laker teammates bailed him out against the Boston Celtics. Did this mean Kobe lacked mental toughness or was slipping? Of course not.
Look at LeBron James — throughout his career, any shot he misses at the end of a game, or any time he passes to a teammate who misses at the end of a game, he gets savaged by a wide cross-section of fans. Despite his 44-8-6 scoreline in Game 1 or his 39-16-11 line in Game 2, you could find plenty of people in the vast realm of social media who said James cost the Cleveland Cavaliers Game 1 with his end-of-regulation miss, and that he very nearly cost the Cavs in Game 2 with a number of late-game bricks.
The fact — and it was a fact — that “Is LeBron clutch?” remained such a central American sports question until his first NBA title in 2012 underscores how much “mental toughness” often gets reduced to “making or missing a big shot in the final minute of an NBA playoff game, especially in the Finals.”
Anyone with a textured and layered understanding of sports psychology — someone who appreciates its place in high-level competition but knows how to avoid overgeneralizing because of it — knows that in professional basketball, “mental toughness” is not about the isolated make or miss, but playing with the right mixture of intensity and intelligence.
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That’s what basketball is really about — intensity and intelligence. The sport requires fierce bursts of energy, accompanied by a very sharp and intuitive understanding of how plays unfold and where players — teammates and opponents alike — are going to be.
Successful offense requires the ability to set screens at the right time and with the right angle, followed by the ability on the part of the shooter to steady himself as he squares up and elevates for the release. Defense — though requiring an all-consuming desire to stay in front of one’s opponent — also demands the ability to read what’s going on and act on that read in a brief period of time.
Professional basketball players go through so many repetitions within a small surface area over the course of a sprawling season. For those who make the NBA Finals, the playoffs last two full months, creating a season that’s nearly eight full months long, not counting the preseason.
With this in mind, the secret to winning basketball in the month of June is not so much about finding the right tactical solution, even though effective tactics can certainly create newfound opportunities to exploit a weakness in the opponent; successful June basketball frequently comes down to giving players the best possible chance to flourish. To be more precise, winning basketball games at this time of year is more about sending the right messages to players than trying to thwart an opponent’s series of maneuvers. It’s what coaches do for their players, not what they do to try to stop the other team, that matters most.
This is where the genius of Steve Kerr’s decision to bench Andrew Bogut — in favor of a small starting lineup with Andre Iguodala — shines through.
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Think about these scenarios in other sports:
* In football, a team’s star quarterback struggles, with his offensive line not giving him a lot of protection. The offense is stagnant. The coach inserts the backup quarterback, and the offense comes to life, with the offensive line providing much better protection and blocking.
* In baseball, a lefthanded relief pitcher is left in to face a righthanded hitter, even though career splits are heavily weighted in favor of the hitter. The manager kept the lefty pitcher in the game because he had just gotten two tough high-leverage outs on excellent pitches, and has thrown the ball better than at any prior point in the season.
* In hockey, a backup goalie who found a good rhythm as a mid-game replacement in Game 2 of a series is made the surprising playoff starter for Game 3 in a 1-1 series.
In each of the three scenarios, the superstar mentality of professional sports — especially at the quarterback spot in football — would suggest that the specialists with the best reputations or historical track records should have been the ones entrusted with the responsibility to run the offense; get that key out; or stop the puck. However, coaches and managers saw that a sole reliance on either history or analytical data needed to be shelved in favor of sending a calculated message.
In the football example, the offensive line realized, “Oh, we have our backup in. We must play better in order to give him a chance and increase our odds of winning.”
In baseball, the pitcher left in the game probably said to himself, “My manager trusts in my ability and sees that I’m throwing great. I’m going to validate his confidence right here and bear down on this hitter who has owned me in the past.”
In hockey, every teammate of the backup goalie said something similar to the offensive linemen in the football example: “Oh, we don’t have [Star Goalie X] in the lineup tonight. We really need to do the extra little things for [Backup Goalie Y].”
These various coaching decisions weren’t really about the moving of chess pieces to counter the opposition. The moves were made to change the mood on the sidelines/field/bench.
With that in mind, let’s return to Game 4 of Warriors-Cavs and the effect Steve Kerr’s move had on Draymond Green, who — after Stephen Curry — was the second-most important Warrior of the 2014-2015 season.
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The first thing that needs to be realized about this move is that while the benching of Bogut marked a clear change, it’s not as though Andre Iguodala’s minutes were radically redistributed as a starter. Having played 32 minutes in Game 1 and 36 in Games 2 and 3, Iggy played 39 in Game 4. That’s not a vast difference.
Also realize that Kerr has been preaching “Pace, pace, pace” until his face has been blue. The core message about ball movement and preventing the ball from getting stuck — the whole familiar nine yards with the Warriors in this long playoff run — has never really changed. Draymond Green always needed to be a better, more efficient distributor of the ball. That message was always out there and known. However, the pressure of the Finals and the defensive pressure applied by Cleveland clearly got to Draymond in each of the first three games.
This lineup twist by Kerr certainly owned a number of well-thought-out tactical dimensions: go smaller; sacrifice baskets to Timofey Mozgov at the other end, but ultimately jump-start our offense against an opponent without Kyrie Irving that can’t keep up in a shootout; remove the bad Bogut-Mozgov matchup from consideration while saving Bogut for Game 5; and create that pace the Warriors need.
However, while acknowledging those tactical components in Kerr’s move, it felt — and still feels — like a move designed to convey in a concrete action what a bunch of words failed to do: “Draymond, you need to play better, and as the center in our small lineup — we’re going all-in with you here — you really don’t have a choice. You must excel if we’re going to win Game 4 and the series.”
Draymond — not with his words but with his level of play in Game 4, essentially told Kerr, “YES, SIR, VICTORY, SIR, THIS WILL GET DONE, SIR!”
Golden State’s coach possesses a keen emotional intelligence as much as a chalkboard understanding of what works and a working historical knowledge of how playoff games are won and lost, having played with NBA champion judo masters such as Michael Jordan and Tim Duncan. It is this acute awareness of sports psychology that shook Draymond (and Harrison Barnes) into a state of mental freshness and on-court vigilance.
Coaching moves at this high a level certainly seek a tactical edge, but in Game 4 of a championship series — precisely 101 games into the Golden State Warriors’ 2015 NBA season — tactics can be overstated.
Draymond Green, no matter what plan Steve Kerr gave the Warriors in Game 4, had to play several times better than he had at any prior point in the NBA Finals. He did, and THAT is why Kerr’s move should be seen as the masterstroke it was.
Great coaches get their players to play well when they need to. The tactics of Steve Kerr helped Draymond Green become his normal difference-making self in Game 4; the message tucked inside those tactics gave Green the awakening he, his game, and his team so desperately needed.