Missed Shots
Basketball is great. Aside from being a wonderful sport it lends itself to some great metaphors for performance and continuous improvement.
Basketball is, in simple terms, about putting a ball in a basket. The more times you succeed in doing so, the more points you get and the more successful you are. Considering that missing the basket in this case is considered a failure, which player do you think has missed the most shots in the history of the NBA — the best professional basketball league in the world? It is probably some hopeless journeyman who played in a thousand games, took lots of shots but never scored enough to make it to that elite level of top-tier players. Never had the ability and never picked up any of the major accolades.
The answer is Kobe Bryant.
Even if you are unfamiliar with the sport, you may have heard of him. He is considered one of the greatest to ever play the game. He tragically passed away along with his young daughter and seven others in a helicopter crash in January 2020.
The legendary Kobe Bryant. Inducted into the basketball Hall Of Fame this year, five-times an NBA Champion, League MVP, eighteen-time NBA All-Star (there’s only one player with more). Him. He’s the guy who has failed the most in the NBA out of the near 5,000 players to have played in the league.
Widely acknowledged as the best player of recent times, LeBron James places fourth on that same list of most career misses and is likely to climb to at least second before he retires. The man universally acclaimed as the greatest player of all-time, Michael Jordan, is eighth. Seeing the pattern?
If you’re going to be great at something, the best approach appears to be to fail at it an awful lot.
Kobe Bryant never had an NBA season in which he made above 47% of the shots he took. LeBron James, who remains an active player, has a career shooting average of 49.5%. Michael Jordan’s career best year saw him successful 54% of the time he tried to score a basket. Michael Jordan. The best player ever to play basketball. Even at his peak, he was able to do his job successfully 54% of the times he tried.
In Kobe’s first season in the NBA, his team (The Los Angeles Lakers) faced The Utah Jazz is a crucial play-off game. The Lakers needed to win this game or their season would be over. They’d be eliminated from championship contention. With the chance to win the game in the final seconds, Kobe found himself with a chance to win the game. He shot an airball — a shot that not only doesn’t hit the net but also misses the rim and the backboard entirely, finding only fresh air before meekly dropping back down to earth. These are rare enough in professional basketball and particularly embarrassing for players. Kobe missed his moment. He failed spectacularly on the big stage. The game went to overtime.
At the start of overtime, Kobe found himself with the ball again and tried another shot. This was another airball. With under a minute to go in overtime and the Lakers down by one score, Kobe found himself with the chance to tie the game. A third airball followed.
Seven seconds remain in overtime. Utah are still ahead by three. This time really is do or die. Last chance saloon. Miss this shot and the Lakers are done, eliminated from the playoffs. Kobe has the ball again and a chance for redemption literally in his own hands. Kobe never lost belief. His confidence in his own ability never waned for a moment. He shot airball number four.
Despite losing this year, Kobe was not done. He regrouped, came back a better player and lost to Utah again in the playoffs again the following year, without winning so much as a game this time. The year after that, he and his Lakers lost at an even earlier stage — again without winning a game in the series. At this point, having been trying for four years, nobody could blame Kobe for giving up on his ambitions to win titles be the greatest player in the world. All he’d known was failure. The misses and embarrassments were piling up. A reputation was starting to develop.
The following year he won the NBA Championship for the first of what would be five times. Having failed repeatedly and suffered levels of embarrassment that would not only dent the confidence but destroy the soul of most people, Kobe went on became king of the basketball world in the 2000s. Those clutch airballs would not define him. Missed shots would not define him. Playoff beat downs would not define him. His countless failures would not define him. All of these misses, all of these shortcomings would only serve to make him stronger and stronger until he was the best.
Kobe’s attitude to failure was appropriately summed up when he talked about the airballs in the game against Utah. He noted that all four of his shots dropped short of the basketball and deduced that it was because at that point of the game he was tired and did not have the fitness levels to perform. He resolved to spend the off-season working on his endurance. How many of us would have the capacity to analyse the most embarrassing moment of our careers in such a way and take something from it that is going to improve us?
Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls lost to the same Detroit Pistons team in the playoffs three years in a row. He lost 4–1 in 1988, 4–2 in 1989 and 4–3 in 1990. How disheartening that must have been. He kept going though and beat them 4–0 in 1991. One victory cost three failures, the same way one basket costs several missed shots. MJ and Kobe both failed his way to greatness. These are the pieces of successful people’s stories that you don’t see, the parts that barely feature in the biographies or documentaries. Kobe is remembered as a champion and the best of his generation, not as the no-hope rookie who shot four duds in a crucial moment in the playoffs. MJ won six championships and is acclaimed by all bar a few as the greatest player of all time, not as the Pistons whipping boy from the late 1980s.
Who the hell cares how many times you have to get something wrong before you get it right? Do you think when you’re on top of the mountain you’re going to care about the ten times you fell on the way up? Not a chance.
Imagine Kobe or MJ had given up when they missed ten shots in a row in practice one day — because that definitely happened. What if Kobe had lost confidence after his horror show against Utah and shriveled into his shell? What if MJ had accepted he was never going to beat the Pistons in the summer of 1990 and given up trying to get better? For one thing, we’d never have gotten The Last Dance.
The secret sauce to becoming great a something? One ingredient seems to be to fail at it. Lose. Lose badly. Come back better and lose again. A lot. Whether you’ve had setback number ten or ten thousand, you never know when you’re on the cusp on success, the brink of greatness. It will come. When it does, and you’re picking up the (perhaps metaphorical) trophy, the last thing on your mind will be all the missed shots on the way there.
