Not what or how many, but when. Not when in time necessarily, but when in the feel or flow of the game.
Professional team sports are about emotion and psychology. They’re about runs and momentum. 30 points in a casual back and forth game flow isn’t deadly. 2 points at the precise moment the opponent cut a 15 point deficit to 6 and was feeling some magic begin to build is.
Like all endeavors, sports have the Pareto thing going on. 5% of plays get 95% of the results. The response, the stare down, the “everything’s ok”, the “I’m back”. These are the plays that matter.
Run stoppers, run starters, responses to big emotion swings, creation of big emotion swings. Just a few plays determine a game. You can see it and feel it. Great players make those plays consistently. Killers. Assassins. Cold blooded. Ruthless. Heartbreakers. Daggers. When that kind of player is on the floor against your team, you fear them. You know some magic is about to happen. Their stats and FG% don’t matter.
MJ had it more than anyone in history. Kobe had it. Dwayne Wade had it and still does even though his body doesn’t cooperate.
LeBron doesn’t have it. Westbrook doesn’t have it. They are stat guys. Perfect in this era of stat worship. They’re guys who get praised for triple doubles when they turnover or miss on the last three possessions of the game and lose because of it. For them, what they rack up is more important than when they do it.
You don’t fear them in big moments against your team. You want them on the floor in those moments. That’s when they brick, or make weird decisions, or turn it over. Their style of play looks greater than all the greats in stat sheets. If timeliness weren’t a factor – the predominant factor – in determining victory, they would be great. But they’re not.
Great players often surprise you when you watch them play and then look at their stats. The stats always seem smaller than you’d expect, because the impact on the team, the timeliness, the way they seized and clearly controlled emotion throughout was so much bigger. Good-not-great players are the opposite. You watch, you see nothing that gives you chills, then you check and their stats are massive. You can’t for the life of you figure out how what you just saw translated into those big numbers.
Highlights don’t do justice either. Everyone has a few posterizing plays. Great players have them more often, but that has nothing to do with their greatness. Young Blake Griffin made posters, but was anti-great. Highlight reels show amazing plays in isolation, devoid of the only thing that matters; the context of the game and the moment. Dunking on a guy is cool. Dunking on a guy who just hit back to back threes tying the game and made your team start to worry is great. If it turns the game.
Everyone knows this. Everyone who watches feels it in their veins. You’re better at seeing it (or its absence) in your own team. They either have or don’t have that thing. But everyone tries to be smart and overthink and use a bunch of convoluted stats and end up sounding like idiots when they discuss greatness. Greatness doesn’t inspire mathematical comparison. Greatness inspires fear. If you watched Jordan play, you never question whether anyone is greater due to some statistical shenanigans. Be serious. Jordan scares you in a way stat packers never do.