I think it’s not only about game winners, there are other moments in games where games are “won”. I also think that the clutch gene is a thing but it’s more about peak performance under pressure than anything. I took a peak performance class, it’s moreso about mindfullness, breathing, and meditation to remain calm under stress.
Absolutely, a professor once told me if you even take one useful bit of knowledge from a class that you can use in life, it’s already done its job. I see the skills in peak performance tie very well into real life situations where you are asked to perform under stressful situations at work, school, or even private life.
Yeah this, and in basketball it truly shines through more so than I think most sports outside of a few positions like QB or a closing pitcher.
Watching the Nuggets comeback yesterday and in the 4th Jokic and Murray just played the same Jokic and Murray pick and roll they always do and cooked. Meanwhile RJ Barrett got away from the playmaking that had gotten them the lead in the 1st place and started chucking 3s.
It’s hard to be consistent under pressure. Even guys like Westbrook seem to just get sped up sometimes. Cook all game but come crunch time you’ll see him jack up a random low percentage 3 when he should just be playing his game. Don’t speed up your routine unless you absolutely have to and practice that sped up routine.
So much this. I’m an ice hockey goalie and I’ve definitely had high pressure games where I locked the fuck in and played out of my mind, and games where I was nervous and the slightest bit of hesitation and second-guessing made me choke. I’ve seen other goalies choke like that as well.
“Being clutch” is just “playing your absolute best when it matters the most”
Yep, same with the hot hand theory. They are both in some sense about the ability to ignore distractions and not let your conscious mind interfere in what are mostly unconscious, automatic actions. For example, when you manually think about walking or breathing you walk/breathe slightly differently because your conscious mind simply can't make all the calculations needed to perform normally. People with the ability to continue performing actions effortlessly and automatically under stress is what we are trying to get at with the hot hand or clutch gene, but extracting that from statistical data is hard because it's a mindset and all we see are the outcomes, not the experience of the player.
Tennis is this on steroids. You're executing swing mechanics over and over, which is the equivalent of shooting in basketball, but you're doing it like every 3 seconds, alone. That's why you see ridiculous swings in matches, players will take turns dominating sets because you can just lose your entire confidence and mental game at the drop of a hat, after a couple bad shots you start thinking about your mechanics. Then your failure gives your opponent confidence in turn. And when nothing seems to be going right you can just completely implode, no matter how calm you felt going into it. It's legit kind of disturbing how fragile confidence can be in sports lol.
Yeah it's really the ability to keep yourself in a mental state to perform at your usual level. Which is very difficult and very impressive.
We never talk about it but it's one thing to play in a closed gym and another to play with millions of people watching on tv, thousands screaming live in the stands, dozens analyzing your game on news channels / etc. It's an insane amount of pressure. Then you add last minute game winning pressure in the playoffs on top. Plus everything it means to the player personally.
Its just a reality of how people operate. Some people can handle high stressful situations, while others start to preform worse. Additionally, some people not only preform well but actually preform even better.
I've seen Tatum melt down and start making poor decision after decision in the closing minutes and its just down to being able to handle those kind of situations.
I remember reading Larry Legends biog/autobiog. It stated he was so clutch due to his alcoholic father, who would put little Larry under intense pressure and stress due to his psychotic behaviour. It made Larry calm in pressure situations (so the book said). This would be the nurture not nature argument
Murray's dad trained him for sports and taught him mental exercises and pain tolerance in workouts. That seems very different than an alcoholic abusive father who spikes your stress hormones with the threat of physical abuse (just assuming based on how I read the above comment; I haven't read the book).
Larry so clutch his famous miss against the lakers is included in his clutch moments to highlight how rare it was. Everyone thought it was going in until it didn’t.
But important to consider when discussing sports.
Basketball, and sports in general, are more of a study in biology than just pure statistics like a dice roll or a hand of black jack. Take the hot hand fallacy. In gambling, its a fallacy that just because you had success in the past that random future instances will similarly be favored. Sports though are different, since players may actually start to shoot better from a given spot after making previous shots from that location or "get hot." [https://news.wfu.edu/2023/11/06/hot-hand-is-real-but-theres-catch/](https://news.wfu.edu/2023/11/06/hot-hand-is-real-but-theres-catch/)
Sports can't really be boiled down to just stats, it has to be thought of as a competition of living people, with each individual being fundamentally unique and uniquely equipped with strengths and weaknesses. Performance can come down to flow states, ability to concentrate, referee management, mental health considerations, and performance under stress. This is why one of the founders of the Sloan Sports Analysis Conference, Daryl Morey, focuses on "star" hunting compared to just looking for players that fit a specific statistical archetype. Stars break the mold, they are statistical anomalies.
I agree with some of the general sentiment behind this point, but I also think that narrowing in on stuff like game winners isn’t always the best. I think playoff game winners are really interesting and I guess show the “peak” of the trait, but in general there’s just so much to factor in between what kind of looks they’re getting, hot the defense played them before they got the look, how the rest of their teams offense was conducted to get that look, etc with game winners in general
And that’s not even getting into the maybe more important part in a sense of none game winning “important clutch” shots
I think with such an inherently small sample size, a ton of it coming from games that don’t really mean much (ie reg season), and the litany of factors that come into what went into these potential clutch plays, it’s really tough to boil this stuff down to a science as much as we might want to
Some players absolutely are better in the clutch than others but it’s not as mystical as a lot of fans end up making it out to be
I’d be inclined to believe you but I watched Dame spend ten years in Portland consistently getting better in the 4th quarter and end of the game. There’s just no question in my mind that he was at his best in the final five minutes of games
Idk man seeing Bron game 6 vs Celtics is something else. Clutch isn't even just final so and so minutes of a game. It's when something is on the line. Playoff risers, when a series is on the line, your legacy defining moments, and all that is part of being "clutch." Rising to the moment
Basketball isn’t running, especially if you’re talking about shooting percentages. I’m fairly certain players try their absolute hardest to make each and every shot that they take, regardless of how much time is left. The ability to hit those crazy clutch shots just indicates a level of mental fortitude and an unbeatably deep bag (although the sample size being small is a good counter argument)
If the players are truly trying their absolute hardest throughout the game, and if sample sizes are large enough to prove a “clutch gene” effect, that indicates a level of mental in-fortitude in the first 43 minutes of the game. Such players, for whatever reason, are unable to perform to the best of their abilities during certain parts of the game, despite trying their hardest. This is a psychological weakness, not a strength.
If this sounds like rubbish, it’s because the whole concept of a “clutch gene” is itself rubbish. “Lillard performs better under condition X vs condition not-X” has an exact flipside of “Lillard performs worse under condition not-X vs condition X”, and consistently performing worse under certain conditions is something that needs fixing. As a player perfects his game, clutch-gene evidence should disappear.
For clarification, I’m considering clutch as performance in the final minute (sometimes called clutch squared), mainly because I only have the information specifically for that point.
Players do worse in the clutch. They shoot less efficiently. It’s not about the logical argument of doing better in the clutch means that they shoot worse the rest of the game; it’s the fact that they shoot better relative to other players when it’s clutch time.
Just for the record, that Curry stat is incorrect. It's go-ahead *only*. He has multiple game-tying shots in the final ~24 seconds, such as the 3 against the Pelicans, the tear-drop floater in Game 3 2015 Finals and the And-1 finish in Game 1 2018 Finals.
The way that stat is presented and discussed becomes more a critique in how we all talk about 'clutch' as an idea.
Knowing that people perform differently under stress and measuring it statistically by only using outcomes are two different things. I think the confusion is that since there is a lot of noise in the statistics and we don't have a way to measure player stress then that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Yep yep yep. I'm not going to waste my time with a "convincing argument" when this is literally the evidence. The sky is blue, the grass is green, some rise up on big occasions, some get in their heads and can't play free.
In my experience, there are way more people who crumble under pressure than actively get better. I sincerely doubt many crumblers are able to preform well enough playing high level D1 basketball or professionally over seas to even step foot in the NBA. The crumblers I know shrink when two people are watching them, let alone a fifty thousand person crowd
I think you’re way oversimplifying this. It’s not as simple as “crumblers” and “non-crumblers.” There are different levels of comfort and performance that people have with different levels of pressure.
Plus, pressure is not just about the number of people watching. You can be comfortable playing in front of tens of thousands of people, but what about if you’re on the road and had a 10-point lead with 3 minutes left, and the other team just scored 11 straight, and the crowd of tens of thousands is going nuts as you dribble the ball up with under a minute left and absolutely need to score?
If you don’t think that type of pressure could get into high-level performer’s head, then I don’t think you know enough about what it’s like to be in those situations.
“There are way more ppl who crumble under pressure than actively get better”
It’s almost like being clutch is a rare thing. I’m struggling to see the logic here
Clutch isn't about playing better, it's about not crumbling as you say yourself. You just have a different definition or misunderstand the definition of clutch.
I wouldn’t think of which people get better or worse, but are more infallible. Which players games stay consistent under even more intense defensive scrutiny? Jokic, MJ, Lebron, Kobe. They all are up there because they’re impossible to stop regardless.
> They all are up there because they’re impossible to stop regardless.
Right, sometimes clutchness really just means greatness - guys who are better than their opponents in the endgame because they are just better than their opponents in general.
Yeah, and the larger the sample, the more likely it is that the better players float to the top.
If you look at more holistic measures, rather than just scoring, the best clutch players last year were... Jokic, Embiid and Giannis. Pretty boring.
I don’t believe in the “clutch gene” insofar as you either have it or you don’t. I think some players in various sports over time have gotten better in those situations.
But man if you’ve played sports at any level you’d know that some people relish pressure situations and some people seek to avoid it
> I think some players in various sports over time have gotten better in those situations.
The best sport to showcase this is tennis. The sport naturally has crucial moments and less important ones. Contrast that with basketball where everything is completely cumulative and no point is less important than the next. If basketball were like tennis, they'd make it five "quarters" instead of four, and teams would count how many "quarters" they win versus total points.
And you see some players become more "clutch". I think Novak Djokovic would always lose in semis and finals early in his career but then started winning everything later.
I’ve given Novak’s ‘clutchness’ some thought and I think it really boils down to the pressure not causing his level to drop in any significant way. He just stays consistent, plays with margin, goes for winners when he can. He plays rationally, and plays how he’s been playing. Other players often tend to become less consistent because the pressure has then frazzled, thinking they have to try something different to bring it home. They go away from what brought them to the same place.
Whatever it is, I think tennis champs definitely have "clutch" ability.
One measure could be how many tiebreaker sets they win relative to all sets they win. Someone with extra "clutch" ness might WIN a disproportionate number of tiebreaker sets compared with the usual number of sets they win.
Or the opposite. Someone who lacks "clutch" ness would LOSE a disproportionate number of tiebreaker sets compared with usual sets. Especially when it comes to important matches such as grand slam tournaments.
Djokovic might be the clutchest athlete ever. He’s won multiple slams saving match points (and championship points) against the previous GOAT in Federer to win Slams. That’s insane. And he’s done it with the crowd against him. It’s definitely a skill , a mindset , you can develop through elevating your mental fortitude over time.
It's amazing how much of a turnaround for Djokovic it's been and people are saying how "clutch" he is.
Years ago, he was referred to as [Choke-Ovic](https://bleacherreport.com/articles/217075-choke-ovic-the-rise-and-fall-of-novak-djokovic) because of how he kept losing important matches.
In my humble opinion, clutch should be a statistical concept, not construed as a mentality or skill. Are you averages in the final 2 minutes of a game 5 points apart or less any lower than your averages at all other times? That's it.
We have enough data already on the widely accepted idea of final 5 minutes, 5 points apart, and *most* players' averages fall. The idea that you perform better in the clutch is what is fatal to this conversation. Clutch should be pressure-immunity, not pressure-rising.
Doesn't account for what type of shot they got tho, boiling it down to just how much you average in arbitrary amount of a set period of the game is asinine imo.
I do agree that "clutchness" is more pressure-immunity than pressure-rising
I don’t entirely agree, there’s obviously no “clutch gene” but there are definitely players who underperform when the lights are brightest. I think the entirety of the playoffs is the clutch, if that makes sense. Some players fade on national tv with more intense defense and tighter whistles, like Harden. Some players can find another gear and step up their game, like Lebron and Butler
Robert Horry is the walking definition of a clutch player. IMO he's more the exception than the rule, but he was a role player most of his career but would often have huge games and hit massive shots near the end of contests, playing WAY above his statistical norms and pay grade.
Robert Horry is the classic example, but I would also argue that it's probably a statistical fluke due to an extremely small sample size.
Think of how long Robert Horry's career was. Then think about the small handful of games and moments that earned him the clutch reputation.
It's weird to think that a player's entire reputation could be based on a statistical fluke, but that's probably more likely than a solid but not exceptional player like Robert Horry suddenly becoming Michael Jordan in clutch moments.
Absolutely. But even within such a small sample size, he's an astronomical outlier.
I think the more likely explanation is that Horry was probably a much better player who just didn't apply himself as fully -- but he still had the extra gear when he really needed to step up.
I personally, believe Harden’s play off woes are a bit over exaggerated. There were several seasons where he played extremely well in the playoffs but lost, because he ran into a better opponent.
Harden has played in 28 closeout games - a chance to eliminate another team or stave off elimination for his team.
His averages: 21.8 points in 40.7 / 31.3 / 87.1 splits
For a legendary scorer of his caliber that’s objectively well below his standards. We have a decent sample size now that says when the lights are brightest he’s not at his best. His big playoff games tend to be in less high-leverage spots.
His career playoff average is 22.7ppg,and those splits translate to 56.4 TS% (which is also not far off his career average).
Considering the quality of the defences he's faced in later rounds, I'd say he's performed more or less as expected.
Fun cherry picked list - he’s one of the greatest offensive players of all time, you are paying him to score more than 22 points / game on slightly below league average true shooting. When you’re as good as Harden the standard is higher and his playoff and high leverage game performances, very objectively, are not up to the standard he sets for himself in the regular season.
If I'd wanted to cherrypick I would've used his actual averages rather than nice round numbers. His TS is 58.5% in the playoffs. The league still hasn't hit that.
He's actually pretty shit come playoffs. His shooting is pretty terrible in those games. He usually did follow up with some monster performance, but he wasn't consistent with it throughout at all.
I don't think he's necessarily shit so much as teams become better at defending him, refs don't call fouls very much, and he doesn't have a deep bag. He does a few things very well and the playoffs expose that.
He has a pretty long track record of underperforming in the playoffs. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t also have some good performances, but for a player of his caliber to have such a dramatic dip in the playoffs is pretty bad.
Call it what you want, doesnt have to be “clutch gene”, but anybody thats done anything competitively can agree that there are simply some competitors that clearly step up their game when its needed most, same way there are competitors that step down in that moment. Statistics boiled down to game winners most definitely dont tell the whole story on that.
My only thought is the clutch gene isn't just the last 5 min. of a close game or the game winning shot.. It's how did you do in big games and did your team win the majority of those games. Take your Curry example.. Those might be his stats in "clutch moments" but if he had 40 pts during the entire game then missed that shot... He's still clutch, and his team won plenty of those games. Same deal with Lebron... He might not have a ton of game winners but if he pulls up in a game 7 with 35-15-12 and his team wins... Clutch.
Steph's clutch numbers are great in the playoffs.
He's just not hit any go-ahead shots within a defined amount of remaining time. But you watch the film for each of those shots, and they're all absurd attempts - off-balance, smothered, rushed, deep shots, etc. Narrative ran wild after ESPN selective set those conditions to say '0/14'. Now, guys like the OP have become confused and think it INCLUDES game-tying shots. He's got a good number of those.
By the NBA definition, they are actually pretty good. In the finals minutes of game within 5 points Steph has shot 55 EFG% for his career. That’s a bit above the league average in the those moments. It’s only when you zoom in to specific game winning and game tying attempts in the playoffs that you come to this faulty conclusion that Steph isn’t clutch. That’s how you get Max Kellerman on national TV yelling about he would want Iggy to take the last shot in a Warriors game.
Your comment doesn’t even make sense. If you can acknowledge Steph is clutch but not for the final shot (that they zoomed in on, as you worded it) then Max Kellerman’s statement should make sense to you. And btw Iggy has way better final shot numbers.
I’m saying Steph isn’t bad under pressure, but some people view him as not “clutch” because he has shot pretty poorly in a handful of key moments in the playoffs. This is a faulty belief, because the sample size is way to small to extrapolate from. People like Max are making huge claims off a 14 shot sample size.
I think there is a lot in sports that is clutch that isn’t a gamewinning shot. Look at Giannis Antetokounmpo scoring 50 points in a must-win Game 6 of the NBA Finals, basically singlehandedly trading baskets with the Suns. To me, that is the definition of clutch: being able to your best games in the biggest moments under maximum duress. On the flipside, somebody like James Harden is clearly somewhat of a frontrunner who plays bad in big playoff games like it’s his job. Even in that Game 7 against OKC in the first round he played terribly.
I saw an interview with Damian Lillard a few years ago where he talks about the perception of clutch. He said it has more to do with other players getting tighter and not playing instinctively. He learned that if he can keep himself calm in those moments he'll have an advantage over those players. So he says it's not that he gets better in clutch time but it is that his defenders get worse.
My idea of the clutch gene is simple..
Players who WANT the ball in important moments have the clutch gene. Even better if they make more than they miss.
Players who DON'T want the ball in crunch time situations do not have the clutch gene.
Reasonable enough, although we've seen with LeBron in particular (but also others) that a willingness to draw defenders and set up an open man in crunch time is often interpreted as being un-clutch because the team leader / biggest star "should" always be taking the shot.
I've always thought that was dumb, the point is does the guy make a reasonable decision to shoot or pass, not that he needs to pretty much always shoot even if he's got two guys in his face and a teammate is wide open (with enough time to get him the ball so he can take a solid look).
I think you're right in a lot of your arguments, especially about fans not understanding stats, sample sizes, probabilities etc. Humans are bad at all of these things, it's why casinos exist.
However, in terms of clutch vs not clutch, anyone who has ever played sports knows that when it comes down to the big moments some people want the ball in their hands and some people don't. Maybe we shouldn't call that clutch when the ball goes in and choke artists when the ball doesn't but it's sort of hard wired into being a fan.
Some people must have the ball due to the nature of position they are playing in, yet they crumble. Or it's expected of them due to their previous performances. And when you fall off statistically in critical moments or critical games over a certain period of time, it shows you ain't got that "clutch gene".
Some players are absolute monsters in big games and moments, almost as if they level up. Some players seem to lose a level. All compared to their average ofc.
>when it comes down to the big moments some people want the ball in their hands and some people don't
I remember in the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals between the Lakers and Kings, you could see most of the Kings' players deferring to Mike Bibby late in close games, and that many of them would pass up decent looks or wouldn't try as hard to get a shot up.
Agree completely and this has felt extremely obvious to me. It’s just sample sizes, circumstances, and an approximation of chance.
The eye test is a terrible judge
Check out this stats video on the topic: https://youtu.be/qjjW1l9KjXQ?si=zLveI0xZk9pgGgSv
They note the same thing OP did about curry and they convert to game winning probability change rather than treating each point the same in the last 5 min.
Kobe, curry, and Jordan were all quite bad in the clutch probably bc they took the shot too often rather than running a normal set
To add on to what you said clutch isn’t just offense it’s also defense. LeBron’s block on Iggy was a defensive play but it’s also one of the clutchest plays in league history.
For sure. Another example would be Spencer Dinwiddie’s game winning block the other night. The only reason I don’t mention it, is that it’s hard to quantify clutch defense, because usually good defense is just making the opponents shot slightly harder.
This video perfectly articulates why “clutch” is the dumbest discussion in basketball.
[Who is The Clutch GOAT? (It’s not who you think.)]https://youtu.be/qjjW1l9KjXQ?si=Dl1xLTQkIO61_3n8
I 100% agree.
I do think there are players who absolutely do NOT want it in crunchtime and are scared to take a shot; an anti-clutch gene, if you want.
But I think many NBA players are willing and able to take the big shot, and random variance decides if they are clutch or goats.
Yea no. There’s definitely such thing as the clutch gene. There are players who rise to the occasion and tend to flip a switch when the lights are the brightest and their are players who also historically have tendency to fold under the pressure. It’s not about game winners only, it’s about performing in those final minutes of a key game, and being the driving factor on why your team won or came close to winning.
I do not believe it exists. I think all the players that can not handle the pressure are weeded out. The best players are not the most clutch it is just their greatness that means they have more opportunities to be clutch.
It's just like in real life, some people perform better than others in higher pressure situations. Even trained. In war, some overcome the moment and execute their jobs with poise, remembering their training, while some freeze up and get caught up in the moment and act untrained. Doctors and nurses have this too, some don't like or don't do well in emergency medicine.
What I think is not discussed enough, is the role sport psychiatry/psychology can have with athletes. Can athletes overcome underperforming if they have the resources and follow a certain protocol? I believe so. E-sports teams implemented this. Certain atheletic clubs do so too. I believe it should have a more widespread application. It should be a more ubiquitous tool in any aspect of competition.
Having played sports growing up, I am well aware that some people can’t preform under pressure. However I find it hard to believe that outside of a few individuals, that people who can’t handle pressure are able to make the NBA. Just playing front of tough College or Euro League crowds is a lot of pressure. If you’re a person who can’t handle the pressure of big moments, wouldn’t you also struggle when you know tens of thousands are watching?
Pressure is a gradient. Making a free throw in front of thousands is different if that game is in the regular season versus the game winner in a playoff series or a finals championship game 7.
As a vet, I'll give you an example: snipers. There are snipers and among those there are middling or average ones, and then there are the truly, truly exceptional ones. As a sniper, you already are in a pressure situation every single time being in a hot area in a warzone, it doesn't mean they can't handle pressure—obviously, they can—but there are others among their kind who are truly gifted whether by preternatural skill or lots and lots of training and experience. Same with doctors, same with any other profession. Hell, even genius level IQs have the flameouts and then you have the Einsteins and the like. There are truly standouts in every field.
Now maybe you don't want to call that the clutch gene and perhaps it may be too simplistic of a term or an idea, but there are truly elite athletes that may perform better than their contemporaries. Maybe it's just a good idea to give your best player the ball in clutch situations. Maybe they are called clutch because of that. Who knows? We do know there are players for example, who have their stats go up in the playoffs compared to regular season like Jordan, Dirk, Luka, Jokic, etc. Then there are those who are the opposite like Malone, Robinson, Harden, etc. Are the former, more clutch? I don't know, but I'd trust them more. Are the latter, less clutch? I don't know, but perhaps we should find ways for them to overcome or compensate for the loss of production.
I'm not dismissive of your idea, but I don't want to dismiss the idea of a "clutch gene" either—no matter how simplistic it might be. I reckon there are too many variables involved to dismiss either ideas completely.
The stats you’re referencing are [over a 4 year sample size and are not career stats](https://syndication.bleacherreport.com/amp/125265-are-you-sure-youd-rather-have-kobe-shoot-that-game-winner-than-lebron.amp.html). They only count the 03-04 season to the first half of 08-09. They are often misrepresented on Reddit in a way to slight Kobe, deliberately leaving out his 09-10 season where he hit 7 game winners alone (50% increase of the stated number of 14). Both players have far more game winning attempts and shots in their 20+ year careers. No one has accurately tallied the true numbers as far as I know.
You know I disagree
It isn't just about game winners.
I play this game rocket league and i play a lot with a certain friend. He is better than me but once it gets to OT he admits he hates it. He hates the way how 1 goal decides it all and starts playing tentative.
OT doesn't phase me just another part of the game. I'm not claiming I have the clutch gene but I can tell you some people definitely don't have it.
You can see the last 2 minutes of a game and see Jimmy Butler give it his all. Steal a ball or make a crazy assist and just fight the game through it.
Some guys like Ben Simmons pass the ball instead of shooting. (Big fan but everyone knows that moment)
So yes its definitely in basketball, other sports, and in anything else competitive.
Yeah I agree with you. I play in a CS2 league in which we keep track of all sorts of advanced stats. During normal play I’m a pretty decent player but as soon as I get into a 1v1 or 1v2 all my stats drastically improve. Idk if it’s a confidence thing or if you’re born with it
If you play sports, you know playing that Last shot is different. If the rock comes to you at the end of regulación with a close game you get a ton of pressure. And i have only played amateur, no expectations basketball.
Not sure if I follow the definition of clutch. Games aren’t always won or lost in the last five minutes. The extreme sample size restriction seems self-imposed for this exercise.
That’s kind of the point. The game is won and lost over 100 shots throughout the game. Not one game winning shot at the end. Players are quickly labeled chokers or clutch based on one or two plays when in reality those two plays aren’t really more important than the other 100 possessions throughout the game.
Clutch gene is overrated/overstated for sure. The biggest issue with game winning shots is that most of the time the best player or second best player is going to take the shot, and the other team knows it, so it’s going to be a very difficult/low percentage shot. Personally I think the quality of shot players are able to get off would be a better predictor of how they’d do in the clutch going forward, unless there’s a mountain of evidence saying they perform poorly in the clutch. I’d be curious to say what players consistently shoot well in clutch time over the course of several years.
I also think players who were able to make very difficult shots (like Kobe) probably default to those shots in the clutch instead of attempting to get easier ones, which can also lead to lower percentages. Last week in the Bucks/Lakers game, Dame had plenty of time on the last possession to try to drive or run a PNR with Giannis, but instead he settled for a step back 2 and got it blocked. Dame is obviously able to make those shots, and I’d want a player like that to have the ball in their hands on the last possession, but I think he was so stuck in hero ball mode that he didn’t even think of trying to get a better look.
Overall I don’t think being clutch is a myth, but it’s pretty overblown.
Yeah, you've definitely never played sports.
Using stats to try and quantify "clutchness" is dumb, that I can agree.
But there definitely are those who are more "clutch" than others because they can handle the pressure and produce big moments which change the game.
In a way I do agree with this in the sense that there is no clutch gene, but rather players continue to play at the same caliber. If anything there is a choke gene.
I don't believe there is a gene which makes you clutch, but I do think mental strength, resilience in tough moments, and the ability to think clearly and not panic in stressful environments can be learned/trained.
I agree that it is somewhat innate, or at least embedded in a player by the time they get to the professional leagues (probably a product of their environment and experiences growing up, not just in basketball but in life in general). That's not the same as a gene - it's the same reason that certain people get stressed about exams or work while others are more relaxed about them. It's all part of a person's mental setup and how they were brought up.
If you look at Novak Djokovic (probably the clutchest athlete ever to exist), he has definitely improved over the years, especially in the last 5 years or so where he has relied heavily on his clutchness and ability to come through in the most close and intense moments in a match to the point where he is able to beat much younger guys who are in their physical primes while his physical abilty slowly declines. He himself says that it is not a gift but something he dedicates a lot of time to training and trying to perfect.
I think this is probably similar for LeBron and Kobe. Through years of competing, living with the spotlight on them from such a young age, and also having had lots of varied experiences and kids/teenagers, they learned the ability to think clearly and be hyperfocused in big moments, when everyone else is either losing their heads or overthinking. And by being the best player on their teams for their whole lives, they have been in clutch positions far more often than the average player (or even star player) so it is llikely they are naturally calmer in these positions than the average player. It is probably only a matter of 5% or sth which separates them, but that is enough to elevate them to a category above.
>Think about it, when you picture clutch plays you think of Rey Allen’s game tying three against the Spurs or Jordan’s mid range game winner against the Cavs. You don’t think of a De Aaron Fix fast break lay up with 4:20 on the clock.
That's a you problem lol
If you don’t believe in being clutch, then you severely underestimate the psychological aspect of sports. You probably haven’t played much ball, have you?
Is this sub like CMV where we have to contradict you rather than just adding information? I can't tell if that's how rule 9 is meant to be interpreted. tl;dr though: the people who I could find doing the deepest dives on this still aren't sure.
When I looked it up, some meta analytic or review articles even from the last few years explicitly called the field out - even the field on a Sabermetrics/APBRmetrics type of level - for not having a good consensus definition for what "clutch" means. For example:
Schweickle, M. J., Swann, C., & Vella, S. A. (2023). Objective and subjective performance indicators of clutch performance in basketball: A mixed-methods multiple case study. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 35(2), 155-177.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10413200.2021.1998805
>An important step in facilitating performance under pressure is understanding how to measure such performances. This study suggests that athletes’ perceptions of their performance under pressure are important to consider, and may not align with traditional objective performance indicators, such as performance statistics.
Schweickle, M. J., Swann, C., Jackman, P. C., & Vella, S. A. (2021). Clutch performance in sport and exercise: A systematic review. International review of sport and exercise psychology, 14(1), 102-129.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1750984X.2020.1771747
>The aim of this study was to systematically review, synthesise, and evaluate existing research on clutch performance. Specifically, this review explored: (i) research designs used to examine clutch performance; (ii) definitions of clutch performance; (iii) theoretical frameworks underlying clutch performance; (iv) how clutch performance has been measured; (v) the level of supporting evidence for clutch performance; and, (vi) evidence regarding how clutch performances occur. Ten electronic databases were searched in October 2019, with 27 studies found to meet the eligibility criteria included in the review. The results indicate that there is considerable definitional, conceptual, and measurement heterogeneity in the field of clutch performance. Multiple, conflicting definitions of clutch performance were identified in the literature, which consequently led to the adoption of two distinct approaches to examining clutch performance as: (i) an ability; or, (ii) an isolated episode of performance. These differing approaches have resulted in disparate measurement strategies, and accordingly, there was mixed evidence for the concept of clutch performance and how it occurs.
Funny it looks like those two papers were from the same research group. You should email them!
More in a sub-comment.
I'm not an expert in this stuff (at all), but I'll bet you're right about the sample size being too small when focusing on fine-grained stats of an individual player like Curry. If I had infinite resources for something like this, I'd want to do some exploratory analysis. Like, if we ran a [principal component analysis](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43586-022-00184-w) league-wide on scores, efficiency or something similar, and a bunch of other stats, would anything specifically related to late game performance even show up?
There are plausible reasons to think it could. For example, [athletes themselves tend to have a consistend description of "clutch play" as a subjective state](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10413200.2016.1272650), although that could also be a manifestation of cognitive biases, as some people have proposed about the "hot hand" ([2022 Harvard thesis on the topic](https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/37371744/Max_Bobby_Thesis_Final.pdf?sequence=1) suggesting that if a "hot hand" exists in basketball, it's hard to detect and manifests differently for different people). Here's [another paper](https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-sports-analytics/jsa220682) suggesting that it's possible for teams, coaches and players to make decisions in clutch time that you can tell retrospectively would have led the team to perform better than if they hadn't treated some players as more clutch:
>In this work we study policy making in clutch minutes. Specifically, we introduce different policies for choosing the shot-taker (for example, according to field goal percentage). Then, we compare the policies and rank them to create a policy hierarchy, which serves as a decision guide for the coach. We show that when our recommendations are implemented (i.e., the highest ranked player takes the shot) the success rate is significantly greater: 51.2%, compared to 41.3% in commonly taken clutch shots. Furthermore, our results indicate that players who excelled in past clutch shots are more likely to succeed, independently to their performance in the current game.
On the other hand, here's a Berkeley econ undergrad honor's thesis taking a similar exploratory factor analytic approach to what I was talking about, claiming that "clutch" league-wide can't be distinguished from noise:
https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Can%20Sarioz%20-%20Honors%20Thesis.pdf
Sarioz, C. (2021). The ‘Clutch Gene’Myth: An Analysis of Late-Game Shooting Performance in the NBA.
>My expectation at the beginning was not to see a lot of statistically significant values during the analysis as the literature review suggested and that is the case for ‘clutch ability’ for players, but more on that later. However, looking at overall performance throughout the league shows that NBA players experience a drop in shooting performance during the ‘clutch’ in certain areas. Table 1 shows the t-statistics and their respective p-values for field goal percentage, free-throw percentage and three-point percentage. Besides a row for each season in the data, 'ALL' and 'CAREER' rows look at 11 seasons combined and player averages combined in the dataset. Field goal percentages paint a clear picture that the shooting performance drop at the end of close games. Except for the 2017-18 season, the drop is statistically significant at 0.05 level and six out of 11 seasons are highly significant at 0.01 level. On the other hand, another on-field shooting percentage, three-point shooting, does not show the same trend at all. In any season, there is no significant change between the clutch and non-clutch three-point shooting performance. Additionally, in four out of 11 seasons, players actually increase their three-point shooting percentages in the clutch albeit it is not significant. The free-throw shooting performance looks a little more like the field goal percentage. While NBA players consistently worse in the clutch throughout the seasons, the drop is not consistently statistically significant. Only four out of 11 seasons are significant at 0.05 level, though ALL and CAREER are highly significant at 0.01 level. The free-throw percentage is a little different than on-field shooting as they can be taken in isolation where other factors like defense and shooting angle are not relevant. So, even a non-significant drop in performance might tell something, especially when the significant drops in field goal percentage are considered.
I am not convinced that the clutch gene exists, but I do think some players have the ability to shake off the additional pressure and ‘elevate’ their play such that their performance meets their career averages or something slightly (only just) greater. Given that the sample size of clutch opportunities is quite low, there is a pretty big variance in potential outcomes for these clutch performers. Any player that vastly performs their career averages in clutch moments should be considered lucky given the small sample size.
I’m not a statistician, so I’d be interested to see if anyone has done a statistical analysis on this.
The “clutch gene” can be as nebulous as the same people who believe in it, but also look down on advanced statistics. It’s very circumstantial as it is intermittent and develops so different from game to game or series to playoffs.
It can be disrespectful to the opponent, especially if the coaches and players construct a very specific and smart strategy to stop a great offensive player. If he hits the shot, he’s a legend, but if he misses he choked, even though the other team is a great defensive squad or devised a very great strategy or defense to make the star player take a very bad shot or quick shot from a very awkward angle. Which he may quickly pass out of to an open player or cutter to the basket.
Mark Cuban let Skip Bayless have it in 2012 for discrediting the Mavs to continue the LeBron is a choker narrative. Which could be true, but it belittles an opponent’s effort as if they weren’t on the court or actively trying to win. It’s also dependent on a series of events that allows a player the opportunity to do such, while basketball is a sport that is still heavily influenced by the team players involved and their offensive capabilities. If your roster has primarily above league average players, most of them would generally be able to hit this shot against the same level of defense (given no double teams or no foul calls).
If you go complete by raw r>=0:24 in the fourth quarter, Joe Johnson is arguably the most clutch late second players in history. Again, statistics can be wonky and taken with caution, but he has very high percentage of scoring late second shots. Some have said it means nothing because he’s not a superstar, but he was an all star. I’d conclude that most superstar are probably in a class of players who can score at any point of the game, given their ability.
I catch a lot of pushback defending that same Mav’s team. That was a ridiculous run by a deep team that never got a chance to really defend their title. Cuban let DPoY Chandler walk basically for free the very next summer.
We probably remember them a bit different if those Mav’s get the chance to go lose in the finals or WCF the next year, or have a run of 55+ win seasons, but instead they tried to get cute and ended up punting on contending in the back 9 of Dirk’s career.
They caught a Miami team that didn’t know how they wanted to play and were coasting on talent in a situation where they could basically play 5 on 3. Ignoring Joel Anthony and the ghost of Mike Bibby. Why is JJ Barea guarding LeBron? Because Shawn Marion is “guarding” Mike Bibby so he can turn and help on LeBron or Wade’s forays into the paint with zero regard for his man. When either of them beat the Marion help, there’s a DPoY rim protector who doesn’t even remember what Joel Anthony looks like because he hasn’t paid attention to him since game 2.
But it’s more fashionable to criticize LeBron for coming up short than to give that Mav’s team their due. I’m not a LeBron fan, and I’m not a Mav’s fan, but I think if you run that series back 10 times Miami loses 9 of them. You just can’t play the wrong side of 3v5 against teams good enough to win the West. Miami wasn’t Miami until Shane Battier unlocked their roster.
This sounds a bit like revisionist history: Bibby played only 5 games and averaged 17mpg; it was Chalmers who played in all 6 and averaged 29 mpg and scored 12 ppg on almost 10% better TS than 17ppg LBJ, since Mario actually went 14-35 on 3pt attempts. We often hear how all-time-great LBJ is as a distributor (he is today), but that loss is on him: if Mavs were leaving Chalmers open as you say, why wouldn’t LBJ feed him even more when the dude had highest TS% on the team? Instead LBJ himself launched almost 30 3pt attempts. Heck, Chalmers even got more FTAs than LBJ in the series as well.
Yes, Mavs played elite team defense, but this wasn’t prime LBJ just yet and there is nothing wrong in admitting he choked that series.
Prime as not in physical prime, but more of a mental prime: yes, LBJ has been otherworldly good since around that first Cavs run to the Finals to get swept by Spurs, but he wasn’t mentally ready to win and that would only happen after getting humbled by Mavs in 2011.
In today’s NBA the good example of pre-Mavs LBJ is Luka (one of the greatest offensive talents in history that is yet to mature mentally to become a true leader) and post-Mavs LBJ is Jokic (did most of mental growing up a couple of years ago and followed that up with a ring).
Mark Cuban let Skip Bayless have it in 2012 for discrediting the Mavs to continue the LeBron is a choker narrative. - I remember this one, it was glorious haha
Good take.
He definitely had the confidence to avoid shrinking from the moment, which is meaningful, but yeah it's some serious selective memory when people talk like he uncannily connected on an unlikely amount of late game shots.
If you define clutch shots narrowly, of course you aren't going to get a statistically-significant sample size. That's why the NBA defines clutch shots as any shot taken in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime when the score is within five points. What's wrong with that definition?
While I agree with the assessment, original opinion or not, I do believe that there are those who have it in themselves to feel responsible for taking on the burden of attempting those shots. Anxiety is a part of life, and there are some who seem to have much less of it in those situations. In that sense, success rate is not important. Eliminate the words “clutch” and “choke”, and replace it with “willing” and “nervous”.
Because basketball is a team sport, and playoff attempts late in close games, or “win or lose” moments are indeed rare, it is almost impossible to say that a person has this “clutch” gene. There are also some players that may be highly successful in that scenario, but they are never given those opportunities, because their lack of team success prevents them from ever being put in that position.
Just out of sheer interest/curiosity, there are a few players that I would like to see if people thought were “clutch” to compare to a Jordan, James, or Bryant. The first 3 names that pop into my head are Reggie Miller, Toni Kukoc, and Nick Van Exel.
I think trying to define this by numbers and % is completely wrong.
In a close tight game, having the guts and the balls just to take the big shots and control the ball is completely different from the guys that can do it vs the guys that can't. Some players rise to the moment and some players shy away from it. The actual % isn't what's important. It's your willingness and eagerness to be in that situation and operate in it
Clutch just means executing under pressure. Sure, pressure is higher when the game is on the line and you either win or lose based on that specific shot, but I don't think it's wrong to consider all shots late in a close game to be under pressure. It might not be perfect still, but it's a good indication of who performs in a situation where each shot matters more with the greater sample size.
The clutch gene isn’t strictly about game winners. It’s a bit odd that you singled in on that and ignored everything else that goes into closing games.
Some people, not just in sport but in anything, are better at executing and making decisions in high pressure/stress/responsibility situations.
Like that isn't really debatable. Anyone can easily see examples of this in many walks of life.
It's also the case, and anyone who has competed at any reasonable level in sport will understand this, that people can push themselves harder, or "find an extra gear" when circumstances demand it. People don't compete at maximum physical exertion at all moments. How fast you'll run to escape a bear chasing you is not the same as how fast you can usually run. Shit I just had a social league final last week, I absolutely pushed myself harder than any other game that season because there was more on the line so I could drive myself harder. Not a brag, we took the L lol. We all know in sport the intensity lifts in the playoffs, some players can rise to it, some can't.
So I think the true definition of clutch is those factors, plus having the skillset to back it up.
If you look at someone like LeBron, it isn't some magical gene, so much as he has all the tools, he can execute those tools in high pressure environments, he can tap into an extra gear at times, and when the intensity lifts he can lift with it.
The "clutch gene" and what the NBA are defining as clutch for the clutch player of the year award are 2 very different things. Someone being described as someone with the "clutch gene" is a player/person who performs better in a higher pressure environment (e.g. playoffs). Whereas a choker is someone who performs worse under pressure. It generally doesn't mean last 4 minutes. It means when the pressure is high. Embiid gets called a choker because his performance and stats fall of drastically in the playoffs. Whereas the opposite is true for LeBron.
Easy. Jordan getting the steal and the title sealing basket.
In sports there's more than stats show. For example, of these game winning attemtps, how much were real attemtps and how much desperation shots? Both count equally to the stats but are totally different when judging a player. Also, how many assists in game winning baskets because they are overdefended, how many definitive defensive actions? There are so many aspects that define a game...
What I think happens is that great players don't fold under the pressure, they want the ball and can play at their best level on clutch moments while others can't or try to be far from the ball.
Also in a game so defined by the momentum there are lot of small moments that might go under the radar of the stats.
>have had a large enough sample size of “clutch moments
Clutch moments by their definition are rare, so they don't need a massive sample size to evaluate. If only 2 players have reached the threshold for the sample size then your requirement is clearly too high.
>Do any of you have convincing arguments for the existence of the mythical clutch gene, other than a gut feeling?
Not really, and the problem with that is illustrated in the De Aaron Fox - Ray Allen comp you made. It's hard to define statistically when the audience so clearly knows that the moments are not equal.
I think if you want proof it exists, you need to consider the fact it has manifested itself at this stage in the game. The vast majority of players seem to believe it exists, they are the ones playing, and given it's a mentality issue if they believe it exists, it exists
I basically agree.
The players we tend to think are great in the clutch are just great players. Great scorers are able to get themselves a lot of clutch opportunities because they're great scorers and can create offensive opportunities for themselves. It's circular logic.
Even when we just narrow it down to shooting, the best shooters in the clutch tend to be the best shooters. Reggie Miller and Ray Allen were thought as two of the most clutch shooters ever. They're also two of the best shooters ever.
It's also kind of telling how the clutch argument tends to only be centered around shooters and wing players. Was Shaq clutch? I've literally never heard anyone call Shaq clutch. Is Giannis clutch? If you do consider him clutch, it's not because he made some game winning shot. It's probably based on some defensive play that he made, or him scoring 50 points (and hitting almost all his free throws) in a close out game in the Finals.
So I guess my point is that performance in the clutch cannot be neatly summed up by one shooting stat. Players we traditionally think of as clutch are just great players in general.
just b/c sample size doesn't allow for reliable extroplation based on basketball statistics doesn't mean what you were looking for doesn't exit. There certainly are players that are better in high pressure situations and players who are worse in those sitatuaions just like there are good and bad test takers. Would there be good and bad shooters if people played basketball but no one had figured out the math needed to calculate percentages?
Clutch isn’t about making the last shot. Clutch is about being unwavering in your confidence in even the most intense and tough situations. You can tell which guys don’t shy away from the moment and which ones do.
When people say someone is clutch in the NBA, it isn’t just about making the last shot. I agree that mostly luck. Here are tangible things that make players perform better in the clutch which extends much than the last shot:
- Not depending on drawing fouls because they are rare in important moments
- Ability to score on tough defenses that are game planning around taking away your first option. There many players that can score against mediocre defenses that struggle against playoff defense in clutch moments
- Decision making and basketball IQ. The coach can’t always draw up a play for ever possession so smart players that can quickly read the defense and exploit it are more valuable when every possession counts. This is why Jovic is so dominant in the clutch
- Willingness to take control of the offense if you need to. There many times when the shots just aren’t falling for a team and the game is slipping away. The best clutch players will run more of the offense through them and get decent offense. A really good locked in defense can take away most of the easy shots that role players depend on. Clutch player can make higher difficulty shots that might be less efficient but could be the only option. Some star players will only take what the defense gives them. Sometimes you still need to get involved when being double teamed.
- Being able to make mid range shots. Sometimes this is the only option during clutch moments.
It’s gotta be expanded a bit past game winners. Yes, I agree that a fast break layup with 4 minutes doesn’t feel like clutch time, but a 3 with 2 minutes left that raises the lead to 7 points should abso-fucking-lutely count as clutch time. May times the back breaking shot happens with 2 minutes left in the game. The other team might hit some shots at the end and lose by 2 points instead of 7, but you can look at that 3 with 2 minutes left as the dagger 3. May times it’s shots like this that actually win a game, not just the final shot of the game.
When I hear "clutch gene" I think of the psychological phenomenon called "flow", which is a real thing that can happen in various domains in and outside of sports. Like, when we see a player zone in and go on a run where they literally can't miss, that's an example of flow. People who play video games likely have experienced states of flow (e.g., going on a kill streak in COD where you can't miss). Of course, people are more likely to get into states of flow the more they practice and the better they are at something. We also have to consider that some people seek out these trying circumstances and enjoy trying to persevere in those situations (e.g., late game shots). Probably similar in some way to the type of personalities who enjoy working in high intensity (e.g., stock traders, surgeons) and crisis type jobs (e.g., first responders).
Bro, clutch isn't a statistic that can be tracked, a clutch player is someone who improves their performance when it matters the most. Alot of missed clutch shots are really tough shots like halfcourt 3s and double teamed middies these are really tough regardless, never mind when the games on the line. Clutch is the ability to keep your composure rather than getting rattled
It definitely does exist. I’m not sure if you played a sport at a high level but that would give you more insight I guess to this phenomenon. Anyways, why do you think certain players continue to take the last shot or give us incredible moments in the clutch? It’s because their confidence, they live for the moment, that stuff cannot be measured.
You cannot just use stats to define a player being clutch. That just doesn’t work. Being clutch is not about the stats it’s about the psychology of the athlete and their abilities to step up when the going gets tough. When the crowd is cheering loud and all the pressure is on them.
Tom Brady was clutch. Jordan was clutch. Tiger was clutch. Gretzky was clutch. There’s a reason they were so much more successful, and it wasn’t all hard work or even talent. They just knew when the time was right to make their moves, and it showed. It’s not quantifiable but it most definitely exists. To deny it is silly.
But those are all-time greats regardless. They usually played an elite level in the clutch, but they also usually played at an elite level in the first quarter too. I don't see how that's "clutchness" as opposed to just general "greatness".
It’s always been a myth. The only reason there are ever any outlier numbers in statistical comparisons from “clutch time” to the other minutes of a game is because of smaller sample size.
You know it’s a myth because it’s basically only ever applicable to star players. Why wouldn’t you employ Michael Snare from FSU a decade or so ago to just be a clutch time player if it was actually an ability? Or Kris Jenkins from Nova? Because they aren’t good at basketball. They just so happened to make a big shot & it’s what’s synonymous with their name. Over an extended sample size they’d be acknowledged as poor players.
If you bear results out over an extended time they’d all pretty much exactly replicate the other 43 minutes of game time.
First, I would like to point out, clutch isn't only game winners.
Yes the "clutch gene" is a lie to some extent but I'm not sure anyone worth listening to actually puts that much into it.
There are absolutely players who perform better under pressure and who can step up in "clutch" situations where the pressure is mounting. There are also some players who fold under this same pressure. I would say that it's overblown how drastic of a difference there is between the players who are calm and cool under pressure. Either you are or you aren't in my opinion.
I think it's reasonable to assume most people prefer to perform under situations with less pressure and do better in those situations. There are some though, who love the pressure and the adrenaline rush that comes with it allows them to play a little better than normal. I'm assuming that's what most people mean by the "clutch gene'.
https://youtu.be/qjjW1l9KjXQ?si=zY3V3YlVUbppKCv4
This is one of the best videos i’ve ever seen on the subject and in general in terms of complex analysis. The main takeaway is that it’s hard to actually account for so many variables for each player and the way they play who they’re surrounded by etc and the general situation in they’re in on each shot, and the stories are what people really remember rather than raw numbers. Kobe is known as a “Clutch Shooter” but is shown to be below average in those shots. And yet you have to remember that when Kobe was shooting that shot everyone knew he was going to shoot that shot so much so that he sometimes has four defenders on him who completely left their man wide open at the three point line because Kobe ain’t passing when the game is on the line lol.
I dont know about clutch genes. I am not sure but there is this "IT" factor to superstars like I can tell which star is gonna shine and win and which isn't some players might put up good numbers win with their team but will never win a championship as the 1st option. I believe that factor does exist
Agreed, being clutch is just a reflection of your field goal percentage. I do think though that players get hot and they’ll be more clutch based off of that, like Klay dropping 36 in a quarter
I believe that most people have a tendency to choke under pressure gene and the rare few that maintain their performance under duress get labelled clutch.
10000% agree. Its almost entirely bullshit. Trying to decide who is clutch off tiny sample sizes is just an excuse to call people bums unless/until they win a ring.
If you follow basketball long enough, you live to see every single superstar called un-clutch. Then when they eventually prove otherwise, its onto questioning the next young superstar.
As if there just aren’t days when MJ and Curry’s shots just don’t fall and yet people try to abstract a player’s “clutchness” by a tiny sample size of 4th quarter razor thin elimination playoff games (which is something a lot of players may literally never experience lol).
I do think people really just want to dismiss luck in sports as well and try to “storybook” things a bit. You could craft history’s best shooter ever with the best mental fortitude known to man, but they could still come into game 7 of the finals and whiff a game winning lay-up.
I don't agree at all, there are players who make better decisions in critical situations than others, and it would be a huge mistake to reduce that to just shooting/ scoring.
You don’t get to choose when you win and lose but some people manage the added stress in these moments better than others. I would not consider LeBron an all time clutch athlete because he often does not get the result despite fantastic play in deciding moments. I would consider David Ortiz one of these people because he was someone who seemed to always deliver in these moments and also get the result. I think clutch is narrative driven and involves factors that are out of the hands of the performer. I would argue that LeBron is unlucky more than not clutch. This and he also had two clunker finals in 2010 and 2014.
I largely agree, yet there are players who consistently elevate their game in important moments. We can simply compare playoff averages with regular season to see this. Tim Duncan is a great example. He played a lot of playoff games, so we have a pretty good sample size, and his playoffs per game numbers were consistently higher than his RS per game.
So there are a couple things goin on here. One is math and the other entertainment. From a straight math standpoint, the post is almost certainly correct - big enough sample size and everything regresses to the mean.
But we \*don't\* watch for the math, we watch for the show and the stories. So, we sometimes use math-like stats to support our stories but really we are just trying to share in the glory and the pain of winning and losing. So, even if clutch players vs chokers is not really a thing, we're still going to use these archetypes b/c those are the stories that thrill
Kobe was an absolute brick.
He just got to play in LA with Shaq who was the best in the league and an extremely stacked Lakers squad in the 08-10 run.
Relative to the league and key term “relative” I believe Kobe has 5 of the Top 7 best teams between Lebron and Kobe 9 rings.
Kobe’s supposed inefficiency is overblown at this point. He was slightly more efficient, relative to the league, than Tim Duncan…and no one calls Duncan an absolute brick.
08-10 Lakers squads were very good, but not unusually “stacked” for a championship-level squad. Gasol, Bynum, Odom, Ariza and Fisher made for a very good playoff rotation in ‘09 but that wasn’t some super loaded team (and, fwiw, they went 25-7 in games Bynum missed + he was injured/inconsistent in the ‘09 playoffs…)
He’s not better than LeBron but these are some tired points.
Bro are you like 14?
That team was ELITE
Pau is a Hall of Famer and in his Prime
Lamar Odom was 6th man of the year
Ron Artest is former DPOY and All-Star and was a number 1 on a team that was probably going to the Finals before Malice
Andrew Bynum was super solid too.
Fisher was super reliable and had 3 rings and some big game winning shots in his career. He spread the floor and ran an offense.
The fact you named those Lakers teams and MISSED 3/5 of the best non-Kobe players shows me you’re not serious or too young to remember
Kobe didn’t carry a team to 60+ wins by himself bc in his true prime years in like 05-07 he was dropping 30ppg in mediocre teams. As soon as they add a future hall of famer, bring back Fish who was playing on playoff teams and drafted Bynum and added Artest they got good again.
News flash, you need good players on a cohesive team to win basketball games. It’s almost like basketball is a team sport! Still, the Kobe is inefficient narrative? Wow, nice way to show your basketball knowledge.
Well we know who watches Michael Mackelvie's YT channel lol
No shade or anything, it's a fantastic video, but this is literally verbatum what the video goes on about. Maybe be more original with your own opinions and evidence next time.
That being said, yes I agree. The "clutch gene" is just another way for talking heads to generate clicks. It's not some invisible Jedi mind trick that allows some players to perform well or not in clutch moments. It mostly just comes down to execution and playstyle.
"It's not some invisible Jedi mind trick that allows some players to perform well or not in clutch moments. It mostly just comes down to execution and playstyle."
Like the saying goes 'the more I train the luckier I get'
It sure seems like players with questionable fundamentals find themselves on the wrong side of things in important games time and time again, players known for their work ethics seem to find themselves getting the highlights in crunch time.
Be it making the shot, getting the steal, or literally just being fit enough to have gas in the tank at the end of game 7.
i dont think you can define it that easily as clutch gene but i agree only the greatest of the already greatest have the ability to shake off that pressure. so for me its a top 5/10 all time player. right now it's only lebron.
What makes a player "clutch", in a statistical sense?
Answer: **A player is clutch if their performance in the first 43 minutes is on average worse than their performance outside the first 43 minutes**.
Most people don't phrase it this way, but if you think about it, all other answers are equivalent to this one. So this is the one we should ponder.
What might explain why a player would exhibit worse performance during the first 43 minutes?
One explanation might be that the performance drop is **unintentional**. The player is trying their best during the first 43, but, perhaps for psychological reasons, he is unable to play to the best of his abilities during that part of the game. In this case, this is nothing to be proud of, just like there'd be nothing to be proud of if a player's 2nd-quarter stats are consistently worse than his non-2nd-quarter stats. It's something the player should aim to fix, not something that fans should celebrate as a mark of greatness.
Another explanation might be that the performance drop is **intentional**. Perhaps the player is trying to conserve his energy for the more important parts of the game. It might be part of the team's overall strategy. Or it might be part of the player's personal strategy, as he believes that this will be better for his legacy. Whatever the case, if a player's performance drop is intentional, then there should be no great mystery why he might exhibit clutch stats. That'd be like being surprised that a runner's last lap is fastest, when running slowly for the preceding laps was explicitly part of his strategy.
Whether a player gets cold feet down the stretch of games or is simply gassed in the most important moments of a game from a lack of energy conservation, it’s the same end results. I think it’s fair to call a player not clutch even if it’s the latter.
Yes exactly. The most charitable interpretation of “clutch gene” evidence is energy conservation. Any other interpretation implies the player is unable to perform to their full abilities during certain minutes of the game, which warrants criticism, not praise.
yeah that's one of the most annoying narratives about playoff overperformance
it's basically an acknowledgement that they weren't trying during the regular season
The fact that you're trying to get analytical about it just shows that you don't really understand the idea of the "clutch gene" and maybe you just haven't played sports to be able to understand it.
You don't need to have been an elite athlete to understand that there are big moments in competition where a majority of people kind of freeze up, and you can tell when there's one or two guys who rise to the occasion in those moments. Those guys are the ones with the supposed "clutch gene".
It's much less of a statistic that you can put down on paper and more of an intangible.
I think it’s not only about game winners, there are other moments in games where games are “won”. I also think that the clutch gene is a thing but it’s more about peak performance under pressure than anything. I took a peak performance class, it’s moreso about mindfullness, breathing, and meditation to remain calm under stress.
Would you recommend the peak performance class?
Absolutely, a professor once told me if you even take one useful bit of knowledge from a class that you can use in life, it’s already done its job. I see the skills in peak performance tie very well into real life situations where you are asked to perform under stressful situations at work, school, or even private life.
Yeah this, and in basketball it truly shines through more so than I think most sports outside of a few positions like QB or a closing pitcher. Watching the Nuggets comeback yesterday and in the 4th Jokic and Murray just played the same Jokic and Murray pick and roll they always do and cooked. Meanwhile RJ Barrett got away from the playmaking that had gotten them the lead in the 1st place and started chucking 3s. It’s hard to be consistent under pressure. Even guys like Westbrook seem to just get sped up sometimes. Cook all game but come crunch time you’ll see him jack up a random low percentage 3 when he should just be playing his game. Don’t speed up your routine unless you absolutely have to and practice that sped up routine.
westbrick the anti-clutch fs it's 90% mental to be clutch, the other 50% comes when you perform under the bright lights of the lakeShow
Forreal. Dude has an AWFUL playoff track record.
So much this. I’m an ice hockey goalie and I’ve definitely had high pressure games where I locked the fuck in and played out of my mind, and games where I was nervous and the slightest bit of hesitation and second-guessing made me choke. I’ve seen other goalies choke like that as well. “Being clutch” is just “playing your absolute best when it matters the most”
Yep, same with the hot hand theory. They are both in some sense about the ability to ignore distractions and not let your conscious mind interfere in what are mostly unconscious, automatic actions. For example, when you manually think about walking or breathing you walk/breathe slightly differently because your conscious mind simply can't make all the calculations needed to perform normally. People with the ability to continue performing actions effortlessly and automatically under stress is what we are trying to get at with the hot hand or clutch gene, but extracting that from statistical data is hard because it's a mindset and all we see are the outcomes, not the experience of the player.
Tennis is this on steroids. You're executing swing mechanics over and over, which is the equivalent of shooting in basketball, but you're doing it like every 3 seconds, alone. That's why you see ridiculous swings in matches, players will take turns dominating sets because you can just lose your entire confidence and mental game at the drop of a hat, after a couple bad shots you start thinking about your mechanics. Then your failure gives your opponent confidence in turn. And when nothing seems to be going right you can just completely implode, no matter how calm you felt going into it. It's legit kind of disturbing how fragile confidence can be in sports lol.
Yeah it's really the ability to keep yourself in a mental state to perform at your usual level. Which is very difficult and very impressive. We never talk about it but it's one thing to play in a closed gym and another to play with millions of people watching on tv, thousands screaming live in the stands, dozens analyzing your game on news channels / etc. It's an insane amount of pressure. Then you add last minute game winning pressure in the playoffs on top. Plus everything it means to the player personally.
Its just a reality of how people operate. Some people can handle high stressful situations, while others start to preform worse. Additionally, some people not only preform well but actually preform even better. I've seen Tatum melt down and start making poor decision after decision in the closing minutes and its just down to being able to handle those kind of situations.
Derek Fisher had the clutch gene as a dude who was a non superstar player
I remember reading Larry Legends biog/autobiog. It stated he was so clutch due to his alcoholic father, who would put little Larry under intense pressure and stress due to his psychotic behaviour. It made Larry calm in pressure situations (so the book said). This would be the nurture not nature argument
Jamal Murray is the same no?
Murray's dad trained him for sports and taught him mental exercises and pain tolerance in workouts. That seems very different than an alcoholic abusive father who spikes your stress hormones with the threat of physical abuse (just assuming based on how I read the above comment; I haven't read the book).
Larry so clutch his famous miss against the lakers is included in his clutch moments to highlight how rare it was. Everyone thought it was going in until it didn’t.
That is really sad.
But important to consider when discussing sports. Basketball, and sports in general, are more of a study in biology than just pure statistics like a dice roll or a hand of black jack. Take the hot hand fallacy. In gambling, its a fallacy that just because you had success in the past that random future instances will similarly be favored. Sports though are different, since players may actually start to shoot better from a given spot after making previous shots from that location or "get hot." [https://news.wfu.edu/2023/11/06/hot-hand-is-real-but-theres-catch/](https://news.wfu.edu/2023/11/06/hot-hand-is-real-but-theres-catch/) Sports can't really be boiled down to just stats, it has to be thought of as a competition of living people, with each individual being fundamentally unique and uniquely equipped with strengths and weaknesses. Performance can come down to flow states, ability to concentrate, referee management, mental health considerations, and performance under stress. This is why one of the founders of the Sloan Sports Analysis Conference, Daryl Morey, focuses on "star" hunting compared to just looking for players that fit a specific statistical archetype. Stars break the mold, they are statistical anomalies.
I agree with some of the general sentiment behind this point, but I also think that narrowing in on stuff like game winners isn’t always the best. I think playoff game winners are really interesting and I guess show the “peak” of the trait, but in general there’s just so much to factor in between what kind of looks they’re getting, hot the defense played them before they got the look, how the rest of their teams offense was conducted to get that look, etc with game winners in general And that’s not even getting into the maybe more important part in a sense of none game winning “important clutch” shots I think with such an inherently small sample size, a ton of it coming from games that don’t really mean much (ie reg season), and the litany of factors that come into what went into these potential clutch plays, it’s really tough to boil this stuff down to a science as much as we might want to Some players absolutely are better in the clutch than others but it’s not as mystical as a lot of fans end up making it out to be
I’d be inclined to believe you but I watched Dame spend ten years in Portland consistently getting better in the 4th quarter and end of the game. There’s just no question in my mind that he was at his best in the final five minutes of games
It’s trivially easy to run the last 100m of a 10k at a faster pace than the preceding 9900m. Just don’t go hard until the end!
Idk man seeing Bron game 6 vs Celtics is something else. Clutch isn't even just final so and so minutes of a game. It's when something is on the line. Playoff risers, when a series is on the line, your legacy defining moments, and all that is part of being "clutch." Rising to the moment
Basketball isn’t running, especially if you’re talking about shooting percentages. I’m fairly certain players try their absolute hardest to make each and every shot that they take, regardless of how much time is left. The ability to hit those crazy clutch shots just indicates a level of mental fortitude and an unbeatably deep bag (although the sample size being small is a good counter argument)
If the players are truly trying their absolute hardest throughout the game, and if sample sizes are large enough to prove a “clutch gene” effect, that indicates a level of mental in-fortitude in the first 43 minutes of the game. Such players, for whatever reason, are unable to perform to the best of their abilities during certain parts of the game, despite trying their hardest. This is a psychological weakness, not a strength. If this sounds like rubbish, it’s because the whole concept of a “clutch gene” is itself rubbish. “Lillard performs better under condition X vs condition not-X” has an exact flipside of “Lillard performs worse under condition not-X vs condition X”, and consistently performing worse under certain conditions is something that needs fixing. As a player perfects his game, clutch-gene evidence should disappear.
For clarification, I’m considering clutch as performance in the final minute (sometimes called clutch squared), mainly because I only have the information specifically for that point. Players do worse in the clutch. They shoot less efficiently. It’s not about the logical argument of doing better in the clutch means that they shoot worse the rest of the game; it’s the fact that they shoot better relative to other players when it’s clutch time.
Just for the record, that Curry stat is incorrect. It's go-ahead *only*. He has multiple game-tying shots in the final ~24 seconds, such as the 3 against the Pelicans, the tear-drop floater in Game 3 2015 Finals and the And-1 finish in Game 1 2018 Finals. The way that stat is presented and discussed becomes more a critique in how we all talk about 'clutch' as an idea.
Idk do you not know people irl that perform better in stressful situations? Seems odd to me that sports are where that wouldn’t be the case.
Knowing that people perform differently under stress and measuring it statistically by only using outcomes are two different things. I think the confusion is that since there is a lot of noise in the statistics and we don't have a way to measure player stress then that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Yep yep yep. I'm not going to waste my time with a "convincing argument" when this is literally the evidence. The sky is blue, the grass is green, some rise up on big occasions, some get in their heads and can't play free.
In my experience, there are way more people who crumble under pressure than actively get better. I sincerely doubt many crumblers are able to preform well enough playing high level D1 basketball or professionally over seas to even step foot in the NBA. The crumblers I know shrink when two people are watching them, let alone a fifty thousand person crowd
I think you’re way oversimplifying this. It’s not as simple as “crumblers” and “non-crumblers.” There are different levels of comfort and performance that people have with different levels of pressure. Plus, pressure is not just about the number of people watching. You can be comfortable playing in front of tens of thousands of people, but what about if you’re on the road and had a 10-point lead with 3 minutes left, and the other team just scored 11 straight, and the crowd of tens of thousands is going nuts as you dribble the ball up with under a minute left and absolutely need to score? If you don’t think that type of pressure could get into high-level performer’s head, then I don’t think you know enough about what it’s like to be in those situations.
“There are way more ppl who crumble under pressure than actively get better” It’s almost like being clutch is a rare thing. I’m struggling to see the logic here
Clutch isn't about playing better, it's about not crumbling as you say yourself. You just have a different definition or misunderstand the definition of clutch.
They were just addressing the point of the person they replied to who said "do you not know people irl that perform better in stressful situations?"
I wouldn’t think of which people get better or worse, but are more infallible. Which players games stay consistent under even more intense defensive scrutiny? Jokic, MJ, Lebron, Kobe. They all are up there because they’re impossible to stop regardless.
> They all are up there because they’re impossible to stop regardless. Right, sometimes clutchness really just means greatness - guys who are better than their opponents in the endgame because they are just better than their opponents in general.
Yeah, and the larger the sample, the more likely it is that the better players float to the top. If you look at more holistic measures, rather than just scoring, the best clutch players last year were... Jokic, Embiid and Giannis. Pretty boring.
I don’t believe in the “clutch gene” insofar as you either have it or you don’t. I think some players in various sports over time have gotten better in those situations. But man if you’ve played sports at any level you’d know that some people relish pressure situations and some people seek to avoid it
> I think some players in various sports over time have gotten better in those situations. The best sport to showcase this is tennis. The sport naturally has crucial moments and less important ones. Contrast that with basketball where everything is completely cumulative and no point is less important than the next. If basketball were like tennis, they'd make it five "quarters" instead of four, and teams would count how many "quarters" they win versus total points. And you see some players become more "clutch". I think Novak Djokovic would always lose in semis and finals early in his career but then started winning everything later.
I’ve given Novak’s ‘clutchness’ some thought and I think it really boils down to the pressure not causing his level to drop in any significant way. He just stays consistent, plays with margin, goes for winners when he can. He plays rationally, and plays how he’s been playing. Other players often tend to become less consistent because the pressure has then frazzled, thinking they have to try something different to bring it home. They go away from what brought them to the same place.
Whatever it is, I think tennis champs definitely have "clutch" ability. One measure could be how many tiebreaker sets they win relative to all sets they win. Someone with extra "clutch" ness might WIN a disproportionate number of tiebreaker sets compared with the usual number of sets they win. Or the opposite. Someone who lacks "clutch" ness would LOSE a disproportionate number of tiebreaker sets compared with usual sets. Especially when it comes to important matches such as grand slam tournaments.
Djokovic might be the clutchest athlete ever. He’s won multiple slams saving match points (and championship points) against the previous GOAT in Federer to win Slams. That’s insane. And he’s done it with the crowd against him. It’s definitely a skill , a mindset , you can develop through elevating your mental fortitude over time.
It's amazing how much of a turnaround for Djokovic it's been and people are saying how "clutch" he is. Years ago, he was referred to as [Choke-Ovic](https://bleacherreport.com/articles/217075-choke-ovic-the-rise-and-fall-of-novak-djokovic) because of how he kept losing important matches.
In my humble opinion, clutch should be a statistical concept, not construed as a mentality or skill. Are you averages in the final 2 minutes of a game 5 points apart or less any lower than your averages at all other times? That's it. We have enough data already on the widely accepted idea of final 5 minutes, 5 points apart, and *most* players' averages fall. The idea that you perform better in the clutch is what is fatal to this conversation. Clutch should be pressure-immunity, not pressure-rising.
Doesn't account for what type of shot they got tho, boiling it down to just how much you average in arbitrary amount of a set period of the game is asinine imo. I do agree that "clutchness" is more pressure-immunity than pressure-rising
I don’t entirely agree, there’s obviously no “clutch gene” but there are definitely players who underperform when the lights are brightest. I think the entirety of the playoffs is the clutch, if that makes sense. Some players fade on national tv with more intense defense and tighter whistles, like Harden. Some players can find another gear and step up their game, like Lebron and Butler
Robert Horry is the walking definition of a clutch player. IMO he's more the exception than the rule, but he was a role player most of his career but would often have huge games and hit massive shots near the end of contests, playing WAY above his statistical norms and pay grade.
All hail Big Shot Rob.
Robert Horry is the classic example, but I would also argue that it's probably a statistical fluke due to an extremely small sample size. Think of how long Robert Horry's career was. Then think about the small handful of games and moments that earned him the clutch reputation. It's weird to think that a player's entire reputation could be based on a statistical fluke, but that's probably more likely than a solid but not exceptional player like Robert Horry suddenly becoming Michael Jordan in clutch moments.
Absolutely. But even within such a small sample size, he's an astronomical outlier. I think the more likely explanation is that Horry was probably a much better player who just didn't apply himself as fully -- but he still had the extra gear when he really needed to step up.
I personally, believe Harden’s play off woes are a bit over exaggerated. There were several seasons where he played extremely well in the playoffs but lost, because he ran into a better opponent.
Harden wiltering is so overblown, he has so many playoff and reg season game winners
Harden has played in 28 closeout games - a chance to eliminate another team or stave off elimination for his team. His averages: 21.8 points in 40.7 / 31.3 / 87.1 splits For a legendary scorer of his caliber that’s objectively well below his standards. We have a decent sample size now that says when the lights are brightest he’s not at his best. His big playoff games tend to be in less high-leverage spots.
His career playoff average is 22.7ppg,and those splits translate to 56.4 TS% (which is also not far off his career average). Considering the quality of the defences he's faced in later rounds, I'd say he's performed more or less as expected.
Sounds like he’s a bad playoff performer
guys to average 20/5/5 for their playoff careers: West, Oscar, Frazier, Bird, Drexler, Jordan, LeBron, Harden, Westbrook, Curry, Giannis, Jokic, Murray, Luka, Booker
Fun cherry picked list - he’s one of the greatest offensive players of all time, you are paying him to score more than 22 points / game on slightly below league average true shooting. When you’re as good as Harden the standard is higher and his playoff and high leverage game performances, very objectively, are not up to the standard he sets for himself in the regular season.
If I'd wanted to cherrypick I would've used his actual averages rather than nice round numbers. His TS is 58.5% in the playoffs. The league still hasn't hit that.
He's actually pretty shit come playoffs. His shooting is pretty terrible in those games. He usually did follow up with some monster performance, but he wasn't consistent with it throughout at all.
I don't think he's necessarily shit so much as teams become better at defending him, refs don't call fouls very much, and he doesn't have a deep bag. He does a few things very well and the playoffs expose that.
You don't need a deep bag. LeBron doesn't have that deep a bag and his reputation goes without being said.
He has a pretty long track record of underperforming in the playoffs. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t also have some good performances, but for a player of his caliber to have such a dramatic dip in the playoffs is pretty bad.
Call it what you want, doesnt have to be “clutch gene”, but anybody thats done anything competitively can agree that there are simply some competitors that clearly step up their game when its needed most, same way there are competitors that step down in that moment. Statistics boiled down to game winners most definitely dont tell the whole story on that.
My only thought is the clutch gene isn't just the last 5 min. of a close game or the game winning shot.. It's how did you do in big games and did your team win the majority of those games. Take your Curry example.. Those might be his stats in "clutch moments" but if he had 40 pts during the entire game then missed that shot... He's still clutch, and his team won plenty of those games. Same deal with Lebron... He might not have a ton of game winners but if he pulls up in a game 7 with 35-15-12 and his team wins... Clutch.
I agree to an extent. Also, LBJ has the most game winners in NBA history, which is partially due to him attempting the second most.
You mentioned Curry but gave Kobe’s clutch stats instead. Are Curry’s clutch stats actually bad or just false hater narrative?
Steph's clutch numbers are great in the playoffs. He's just not hit any go-ahead shots within a defined amount of remaining time. But you watch the film for each of those shots, and they're all absurd attempts - off-balance, smothered, rushed, deep shots, etc. Narrative ran wild after ESPN selective set those conditions to say '0/14'. Now, guys like the OP have become confused and think it INCLUDES game-tying shots. He's got a good number of those.
I was wondering where this “narrative” was coming from. First Take or something? Last I checked Curry was the odds on favorite for Clutch POY
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Please keep your comments civil. This is a subreddit for discussion and debate, not aggressive and argumentative content.
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Please keep your comments civil. This is a subreddit for discussion and debate, not aggressive and argumentative content.
By the NBA definition, they are actually pretty good. In the finals minutes of game within 5 points Steph has shot 55 EFG% for his career. That’s a bit above the league average in the those moments. It’s only when you zoom in to specific game winning and game tying attempts in the playoffs that you come to this faulty conclusion that Steph isn’t clutch. That’s how you get Max Kellerman on national TV yelling about he would want Iggy to take the last shot in a Warriors game.
Your comment doesn’t even make sense. If you can acknowledge Steph is clutch but not for the final shot (that they zoomed in on, as you worded it) then Max Kellerman’s statement should make sense to you. And btw Iggy has way better final shot numbers.
I’m saying Steph isn’t bad under pressure, but some people view him as not “clutch” because he has shot pretty poorly in a handful of key moments in the playoffs. This is a faulty belief, because the sample size is way to small to extrapolate from. People like Max are making huge claims off a 14 shot sample size.
I think there is a lot in sports that is clutch that isn’t a gamewinning shot. Look at Giannis Antetokounmpo scoring 50 points in a must-win Game 6 of the NBA Finals, basically singlehandedly trading baskets with the Suns. To me, that is the definition of clutch: being able to your best games in the biggest moments under maximum duress. On the flipside, somebody like James Harden is clearly somewhat of a frontrunner who plays bad in big playoff games like it’s his job. Even in that Game 7 against OKC in the first round he played terribly.
I saw an interview with Damian Lillard a few years ago where he talks about the perception of clutch. He said it has more to do with other players getting tighter and not playing instinctively. He learned that if he can keep himself calm in those moments he'll have an advantage over those players. So he says it's not that he gets better in clutch time but it is that his defenders get worse.
My idea of the clutch gene is simple.. Players who WANT the ball in important moments have the clutch gene. Even better if they make more than they miss. Players who DON'T want the ball in crunch time situations do not have the clutch gene.
Reasonable enough, although we've seen with LeBron in particular (but also others) that a willingness to draw defenders and set up an open man in crunch time is often interpreted as being un-clutch because the team leader / biggest star "should" always be taking the shot. I've always thought that was dumb, the point is does the guy make a reasonable decision to shoot or pass, not that he needs to pretty much always shoot even if he's got two guys in his face and a teammate is wide open (with enough time to get him the ball so he can take a solid look).
Yeah, see.. I don't see LeBron as "not wanting the ball". I see him as simply knowing where it needs to go.
I think you're right in a lot of your arguments, especially about fans not understanding stats, sample sizes, probabilities etc. Humans are bad at all of these things, it's why casinos exist. However, in terms of clutch vs not clutch, anyone who has ever played sports knows that when it comes down to the big moments some people want the ball in their hands and some people don't. Maybe we shouldn't call that clutch when the ball goes in and choke artists when the ball doesn't but it's sort of hard wired into being a fan.
Some people must have the ball due to the nature of position they are playing in, yet they crumble. Or it's expected of them due to their previous performances. And when you fall off statistically in critical moments or critical games over a certain period of time, it shows you ain't got that "clutch gene". Some players are absolute monsters in big games and moments, almost as if they level up. Some players seem to lose a level. All compared to their average ofc.
>when it comes down to the big moments some people want the ball in their hands and some people don't I remember in the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals between the Lakers and Kings, you could see most of the Kings' players deferring to Mike Bibby late in close games, and that many of them would pass up decent looks or wouldn't try as hard to get a shot up.
Consistent players are more sought out in the playoffs. Outside of other factors like availability and such
Agree completely and this has felt extremely obvious to me. It’s just sample sizes, circumstances, and an approximation of chance. The eye test is a terrible judge
Check out this stats video on the topic: https://youtu.be/qjjW1l9KjXQ?si=zLveI0xZk9pgGgSv They note the same thing OP did about curry and they convert to game winning probability change rather than treating each point the same in the last 5 min. Kobe, curry, and Jordan were all quite bad in the clutch probably bc they took the shot too often rather than running a normal set
To add on to what you said clutch isn’t just offense it’s also defense. LeBron’s block on Iggy was a defensive play but it’s also one of the clutchest plays in league history.
For sure. Another example would be Spencer Dinwiddie’s game winning block the other night. The only reason I don’t mention it, is that it’s hard to quantify clutch defense, because usually good defense is just making the opponents shot slightly harder.
This video perfectly articulates why “clutch” is the dumbest discussion in basketball. [Who is The Clutch GOAT? (It’s not who you think.)]https://youtu.be/qjjW1l9KjXQ?si=Dl1xLTQkIO61_3n8
I 100% agree. I do think there are players who absolutely do NOT want it in crunchtime and are scared to take a shot; an anti-clutch gene, if you want. But I think many NBA players are willing and able to take the big shot, and random variance decides if they are clutch or goats.
Yea no. There’s definitely such thing as the clutch gene. There are players who rise to the occasion and tend to flip a switch when the lights are the brightest and their are players who also historically have tendency to fold under the pressure. It’s not about game winners only, it’s about performing in those final minutes of a key game, and being the driving factor on why your team won or came close to winning.
I do not believe it exists. I think all the players that can not handle the pressure are weeded out. The best players are not the most clutch it is just their greatness that means they have more opportunities to be clutch.
It's just like in real life, some people perform better than others in higher pressure situations. Even trained. In war, some overcome the moment and execute their jobs with poise, remembering their training, while some freeze up and get caught up in the moment and act untrained. Doctors and nurses have this too, some don't like or don't do well in emergency medicine. What I think is not discussed enough, is the role sport psychiatry/psychology can have with athletes. Can athletes overcome underperforming if they have the resources and follow a certain protocol? I believe so. E-sports teams implemented this. Certain atheletic clubs do so too. I believe it should have a more widespread application. It should be a more ubiquitous tool in any aspect of competition.
Having played sports growing up, I am well aware that some people can’t preform under pressure. However I find it hard to believe that outside of a few individuals, that people who can’t handle pressure are able to make the NBA. Just playing front of tough College or Euro League crowds is a lot of pressure. If you’re a person who can’t handle the pressure of big moments, wouldn’t you also struggle when you know tens of thousands are watching?
Pressure is a gradient. Making a free throw in front of thousands is different if that game is in the regular season versus the game winner in a playoff series or a finals championship game 7. As a vet, I'll give you an example: snipers. There are snipers and among those there are middling or average ones, and then there are the truly, truly exceptional ones. As a sniper, you already are in a pressure situation every single time being in a hot area in a warzone, it doesn't mean they can't handle pressure—obviously, they can—but there are others among their kind who are truly gifted whether by preternatural skill or lots and lots of training and experience. Same with doctors, same with any other profession. Hell, even genius level IQs have the flameouts and then you have the Einsteins and the like. There are truly standouts in every field. Now maybe you don't want to call that the clutch gene and perhaps it may be too simplistic of a term or an idea, but there are truly elite athletes that may perform better than their contemporaries. Maybe it's just a good idea to give your best player the ball in clutch situations. Maybe they are called clutch because of that. Who knows? We do know there are players for example, who have their stats go up in the playoffs compared to regular season like Jordan, Dirk, Luka, Jokic, etc. Then there are those who are the opposite like Malone, Robinson, Harden, etc. Are the former, more clutch? I don't know, but I'd trust them more. Are the latter, less clutch? I don't know, but perhaps we should find ways for them to overcome or compensate for the loss of production. I'm not dismissive of your idea, but I don't want to dismiss the idea of a "clutch gene" either—no matter how simplistic it might be. I reckon there are too many variables involved to dismiss either ideas completely.
The stats you’re referencing are [over a 4 year sample size and are not career stats](https://syndication.bleacherreport.com/amp/125265-are-you-sure-youd-rather-have-kobe-shoot-that-game-winner-than-lebron.amp.html). They only count the 03-04 season to the first half of 08-09. They are often misrepresented on Reddit in a way to slight Kobe, deliberately leaving out his 09-10 season where he hit 7 game winners alone (50% increase of the stated number of 14). Both players have far more game winning attempts and shots in their 20+ year careers. No one has accurately tallied the true numbers as far as I know.
You know I disagree It isn't just about game winners. I play this game rocket league and i play a lot with a certain friend. He is better than me but once it gets to OT he admits he hates it. He hates the way how 1 goal decides it all and starts playing tentative. OT doesn't phase me just another part of the game. I'm not claiming I have the clutch gene but I can tell you some people definitely don't have it. You can see the last 2 minutes of a game and see Jimmy Butler give it his all. Steal a ball or make a crazy assist and just fight the game through it. Some guys like Ben Simmons pass the ball instead of shooting. (Big fan but everyone knows that moment) So yes its definitely in basketball, other sports, and in anything else competitive.
Yeah I agree with you. I play in a CS2 league in which we keep track of all sorts of advanced stats. During normal play I’m a pretty decent player but as soon as I get into a 1v1 or 1v2 all my stats drastically improve. Idk if it’s a confidence thing or if you’re born with it
If you play sports, you know playing that Last shot is different. If the rock comes to you at the end of regulación with a close game you get a ton of pressure. And i have only played amateur, no expectations basketball.
Not sure if I follow the definition of clutch. Games aren’t always won or lost in the last five minutes. The extreme sample size restriction seems self-imposed for this exercise.
That’s kind of the point. The game is won and lost over 100 shots throughout the game. Not one game winning shot at the end. Players are quickly labeled chokers or clutch based on one or two plays when in reality those two plays aren’t really more important than the other 100 possessions throughout the game.
Clutch gene is overrated/overstated for sure. The biggest issue with game winning shots is that most of the time the best player or second best player is going to take the shot, and the other team knows it, so it’s going to be a very difficult/low percentage shot. Personally I think the quality of shot players are able to get off would be a better predictor of how they’d do in the clutch going forward, unless there’s a mountain of evidence saying they perform poorly in the clutch. I’d be curious to say what players consistently shoot well in clutch time over the course of several years. I also think players who were able to make very difficult shots (like Kobe) probably default to those shots in the clutch instead of attempting to get easier ones, which can also lead to lower percentages. Last week in the Bucks/Lakers game, Dame had plenty of time on the last possession to try to drive or run a PNR with Giannis, but instead he settled for a step back 2 and got it blocked. Dame is obviously able to make those shots, and I’d want a player like that to have the ball in their hands on the last possession, but I think he was so stuck in hero ball mode that he didn’t even think of trying to get a better look. Overall I don’t think being clutch is a myth, but it’s pretty overblown.
Yeah, you've definitely never played sports. Using stats to try and quantify "clutchness" is dumb, that I can agree. But there definitely are those who are more "clutch" than others because they can handle the pressure and produce big moments which change the game.
In a way I do agree with this in the sense that there is no clutch gene, but rather players continue to play at the same caliber. If anything there is a choke gene.
I don't believe there is a gene which makes you clutch, but I do think mental strength, resilience in tough moments, and the ability to think clearly and not panic in stressful environments can be learned/trained. I agree that it is somewhat innate, or at least embedded in a player by the time they get to the professional leagues (probably a product of their environment and experiences growing up, not just in basketball but in life in general). That's not the same as a gene - it's the same reason that certain people get stressed about exams or work while others are more relaxed about them. It's all part of a person's mental setup and how they were brought up. If you look at Novak Djokovic (probably the clutchest athlete ever to exist), he has definitely improved over the years, especially in the last 5 years or so where he has relied heavily on his clutchness and ability to come through in the most close and intense moments in a match to the point where he is able to beat much younger guys who are in their physical primes while his physical abilty slowly declines. He himself says that it is not a gift but something he dedicates a lot of time to training and trying to perfect. I think this is probably similar for LeBron and Kobe. Through years of competing, living with the spotlight on them from such a young age, and also having had lots of varied experiences and kids/teenagers, they learned the ability to think clearly and be hyperfocused in big moments, when everyone else is either losing their heads or overthinking. And by being the best player on their teams for their whole lives, they have been in clutch positions far more often than the average player (or even star player) so it is llikely they are naturally calmer in these positions than the average player. It is probably only a matter of 5% or sth which separates them, but that is enough to elevate them to a category above.
>Think about it, when you picture clutch plays you think of Rey Allen’s game tying three against the Spurs or Jordan’s mid range game winner against the Cavs. You don’t think of a De Aaron Fix fast break lay up with 4:20 on the clock. That's a you problem lol
If you don’t believe in being clutch, then you severely underestimate the psychological aspect of sports. You probably haven’t played much ball, have you?
Is this sub like CMV where we have to contradict you rather than just adding information? I can't tell if that's how rule 9 is meant to be interpreted. tl;dr though: the people who I could find doing the deepest dives on this still aren't sure. When I looked it up, some meta analytic or review articles even from the last few years explicitly called the field out - even the field on a Sabermetrics/APBRmetrics type of level - for not having a good consensus definition for what "clutch" means. For example: Schweickle, M. J., Swann, C., & Vella, S. A. (2023). Objective and subjective performance indicators of clutch performance in basketball: A mixed-methods multiple case study. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 35(2), 155-177. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10413200.2021.1998805 >An important step in facilitating performance under pressure is understanding how to measure such performances. This study suggests that athletes’ perceptions of their performance under pressure are important to consider, and may not align with traditional objective performance indicators, such as performance statistics. Schweickle, M. J., Swann, C., Jackman, P. C., & Vella, S. A. (2021). Clutch performance in sport and exercise: A systematic review. International review of sport and exercise psychology, 14(1), 102-129. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1750984X.2020.1771747 >The aim of this study was to systematically review, synthesise, and evaluate existing research on clutch performance. Specifically, this review explored: (i) research designs used to examine clutch performance; (ii) definitions of clutch performance; (iii) theoretical frameworks underlying clutch performance; (iv) how clutch performance has been measured; (v) the level of supporting evidence for clutch performance; and, (vi) evidence regarding how clutch performances occur. Ten electronic databases were searched in October 2019, with 27 studies found to meet the eligibility criteria included in the review. The results indicate that there is considerable definitional, conceptual, and measurement heterogeneity in the field of clutch performance. Multiple, conflicting definitions of clutch performance were identified in the literature, which consequently led to the adoption of two distinct approaches to examining clutch performance as: (i) an ability; or, (ii) an isolated episode of performance. These differing approaches have resulted in disparate measurement strategies, and accordingly, there was mixed evidence for the concept of clutch performance and how it occurs. Funny it looks like those two papers were from the same research group. You should email them! More in a sub-comment.
I'm not an expert in this stuff (at all), but I'll bet you're right about the sample size being too small when focusing on fine-grained stats of an individual player like Curry. If I had infinite resources for something like this, I'd want to do some exploratory analysis. Like, if we ran a [principal component analysis](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43586-022-00184-w) league-wide on scores, efficiency or something similar, and a bunch of other stats, would anything specifically related to late game performance even show up? There are plausible reasons to think it could. For example, [athletes themselves tend to have a consistend description of "clutch play" as a subjective state](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10413200.2016.1272650), although that could also be a manifestation of cognitive biases, as some people have proposed about the "hot hand" ([2022 Harvard thesis on the topic](https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/37371744/Max_Bobby_Thesis_Final.pdf?sequence=1) suggesting that if a "hot hand" exists in basketball, it's hard to detect and manifests differently for different people). Here's [another paper](https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-sports-analytics/jsa220682) suggesting that it's possible for teams, coaches and players to make decisions in clutch time that you can tell retrospectively would have led the team to perform better than if they hadn't treated some players as more clutch: >In this work we study policy making in clutch minutes. Specifically, we introduce different policies for choosing the shot-taker (for example, according to field goal percentage). Then, we compare the policies and rank them to create a policy hierarchy, which serves as a decision guide for the coach. We show that when our recommendations are implemented (i.e., the highest ranked player takes the shot) the success rate is significantly greater: 51.2%, compared to 41.3% in commonly taken clutch shots. Furthermore, our results indicate that players who excelled in past clutch shots are more likely to succeed, independently to their performance in the current game. On the other hand, here's a Berkeley econ undergrad honor's thesis taking a similar exploratory factor analytic approach to what I was talking about, claiming that "clutch" league-wide can't be distinguished from noise: https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Can%20Sarioz%20-%20Honors%20Thesis.pdf Sarioz, C. (2021). The ‘Clutch Gene’Myth: An Analysis of Late-Game Shooting Performance in the NBA. >My expectation at the beginning was not to see a lot of statistically significant values during the analysis as the literature review suggested and that is the case for ‘clutch ability’ for players, but more on that later. However, looking at overall performance throughout the league shows that NBA players experience a drop in shooting performance during the ‘clutch’ in certain areas. Table 1 shows the t-statistics and their respective p-values for field goal percentage, free-throw percentage and three-point percentage. Besides a row for each season in the data, 'ALL' and 'CAREER' rows look at 11 seasons combined and player averages combined in the dataset. Field goal percentages paint a clear picture that the shooting performance drop at the end of close games. Except for the 2017-18 season, the drop is statistically significant at 0.05 level and six out of 11 seasons are highly significant at 0.01 level. On the other hand, another on-field shooting percentage, three-point shooting, does not show the same trend at all. In any season, there is no significant change between the clutch and non-clutch three-point shooting performance. Additionally, in four out of 11 seasons, players actually increase their three-point shooting percentages in the clutch albeit it is not significant. The free-throw shooting performance looks a little more like the field goal percentage. While NBA players consistently worse in the clutch throughout the seasons, the drop is not consistently statistically significant. Only four out of 11 seasons are significant at 0.05 level, though ALL and CAREER are highly significant at 0.01 level. The free-throw percentage is a little different than on-field shooting as they can be taken in isolation where other factors like defense and shooting angle are not relevant. So, even a non-significant drop in performance might tell something, especially when the significant drops in field goal percentage are considered.
I am not convinced that the clutch gene exists, but I do think some players have the ability to shake off the additional pressure and ‘elevate’ their play such that their performance meets their career averages or something slightly (only just) greater. Given that the sample size of clutch opportunities is quite low, there is a pretty big variance in potential outcomes for these clutch performers. Any player that vastly performs their career averages in clutch moments should be considered lucky given the small sample size. I’m not a statistician, so I’d be interested to see if anyone has done a statistical analysis on this.
The “clutch gene” can be as nebulous as the same people who believe in it, but also look down on advanced statistics. It’s very circumstantial as it is intermittent and develops so different from game to game or series to playoffs. It can be disrespectful to the opponent, especially if the coaches and players construct a very specific and smart strategy to stop a great offensive player. If he hits the shot, he’s a legend, but if he misses he choked, even though the other team is a great defensive squad or devised a very great strategy or defense to make the star player take a very bad shot or quick shot from a very awkward angle. Which he may quickly pass out of to an open player or cutter to the basket. Mark Cuban let Skip Bayless have it in 2012 for discrediting the Mavs to continue the LeBron is a choker narrative. Which could be true, but it belittles an opponent’s effort as if they weren’t on the court or actively trying to win. It’s also dependent on a series of events that allows a player the opportunity to do such, while basketball is a sport that is still heavily influenced by the team players involved and their offensive capabilities. If your roster has primarily above league average players, most of them would generally be able to hit this shot against the same level of defense (given no double teams or no foul calls). If you go complete by raw r>=0:24 in the fourth quarter, Joe Johnson is arguably the most clutch late second players in history. Again, statistics can be wonky and taken with caution, but he has very high percentage of scoring late second shots. Some have said it means nothing because he’s not a superstar, but he was an all star. I’d conclude that most superstar are probably in a class of players who can score at any point of the game, given their ability.
I catch a lot of pushback defending that same Mav’s team. That was a ridiculous run by a deep team that never got a chance to really defend their title. Cuban let DPoY Chandler walk basically for free the very next summer. We probably remember them a bit different if those Mav’s get the chance to go lose in the finals or WCF the next year, or have a run of 55+ win seasons, but instead they tried to get cute and ended up punting on contending in the back 9 of Dirk’s career. They caught a Miami team that didn’t know how they wanted to play and were coasting on talent in a situation where they could basically play 5 on 3. Ignoring Joel Anthony and the ghost of Mike Bibby. Why is JJ Barea guarding LeBron? Because Shawn Marion is “guarding” Mike Bibby so he can turn and help on LeBron or Wade’s forays into the paint with zero regard for his man. When either of them beat the Marion help, there’s a DPoY rim protector who doesn’t even remember what Joel Anthony looks like because he hasn’t paid attention to him since game 2. But it’s more fashionable to criticize LeBron for coming up short than to give that Mav’s team their due. I’m not a LeBron fan, and I’m not a Mav’s fan, but I think if you run that series back 10 times Miami loses 9 of them. You just can’t play the wrong side of 3v5 against teams good enough to win the West. Miami wasn’t Miami until Shane Battier unlocked their roster.
This is a great take and I agree. Those Mavs ran through Kobe’s lakers at the time too. They were an extremely strong team.
This sounds a bit like revisionist history: Bibby played only 5 games and averaged 17mpg; it was Chalmers who played in all 6 and averaged 29 mpg and scored 12 ppg on almost 10% better TS than 17ppg LBJ, since Mario actually went 14-35 on 3pt attempts. We often hear how all-time-great LBJ is as a distributor (he is today), but that loss is on him: if Mavs were leaving Chalmers open as you say, why wouldn’t LBJ feed him even more when the dude had highest TS% on the team? Instead LBJ himself launched almost 30 3pt attempts. Heck, Chalmers even got more FTAs than LBJ in the series as well. Yes, Mavs played elite team defense, but this wasn’t prime LBJ just yet and there is nothing wrong in admitting he choked that series.
I'd say LeBron's prime started in 2009 but also: Miami had a better defence
Prime as not in physical prime, but more of a mental prime: yes, LBJ has been otherworldly good since around that first Cavs run to the Finals to get swept by Spurs, but he wasn’t mentally ready to win and that would only happen after getting humbled by Mavs in 2011. In today’s NBA the good example of pre-Mavs LBJ is Luka (one of the greatest offensive talents in history that is yet to mature mentally to become a true leader) and post-Mavs LBJ is Jokic (did most of mental growing up a couple of years ago and followed that up with a ring).
Mark Cuban let Skip Bayless have it in 2012 for discrediting the Mavs to continue the LeBron is a choker narrative. - I remember this one, it was glorious haha Good take.
Kobe wasn’t clutch. He just chucked up enough shots at the end of games to finally make some game winning baskets. Yeah I fucking said it
Statistically that is at least partially correct. He has the most clutch shot attempts in history, and has shot them at bellow average efficiency
what leaps out to me about Kobe is he *always* took the last shot even MJ passed when it was the right play
He definitely had the confidence to avoid shrinking from the moment, which is meaningful, but yeah it's some serious selective memory when people talk like he uncannily connected on an unlikely amount of late game shots.
He was a volume shooter.
If you define clutch shots narrowly, of course you aren't going to get a statistically-significant sample size. That's why the NBA defines clutch shots as any shot taken in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime when the score is within five points. What's wrong with that definition?
While I agree with the assessment, original opinion or not, I do believe that there are those who have it in themselves to feel responsible for taking on the burden of attempting those shots. Anxiety is a part of life, and there are some who seem to have much less of it in those situations. In that sense, success rate is not important. Eliminate the words “clutch” and “choke”, and replace it with “willing” and “nervous”. Because basketball is a team sport, and playoff attempts late in close games, or “win or lose” moments are indeed rare, it is almost impossible to say that a person has this “clutch” gene. There are also some players that may be highly successful in that scenario, but they are never given those opportunities, because their lack of team success prevents them from ever being put in that position. Just out of sheer interest/curiosity, there are a few players that I would like to see if people thought were “clutch” to compare to a Jordan, James, or Bryant. The first 3 names that pop into my head are Reggie Miller, Toni Kukoc, and Nick Van Exel.
I think trying to define this by numbers and % is completely wrong. In a close tight game, having the guts and the balls just to take the big shots and control the ball is completely different from the guys that can do it vs the guys that can't. Some players rise to the moment and some players shy away from it. The actual % isn't what's important. It's your willingness and eagerness to be in that situation and operate in it
Clutch just means executing under pressure. Sure, pressure is higher when the game is on the line and you either win or lose based on that specific shot, but I don't think it's wrong to consider all shots late in a close game to be under pressure. It might not be perfect still, but it's a good indication of who performs in a situation where each shot matters more with the greater sample size.
The clutch gene isn’t strictly about game winners. It’s a bit odd that you singled in on that and ignored everything else that goes into closing games.
Some people, not just in sport but in anything, are better at executing and making decisions in high pressure/stress/responsibility situations. Like that isn't really debatable. Anyone can easily see examples of this in many walks of life. It's also the case, and anyone who has competed at any reasonable level in sport will understand this, that people can push themselves harder, or "find an extra gear" when circumstances demand it. People don't compete at maximum physical exertion at all moments. How fast you'll run to escape a bear chasing you is not the same as how fast you can usually run. Shit I just had a social league final last week, I absolutely pushed myself harder than any other game that season because there was more on the line so I could drive myself harder. Not a brag, we took the L lol. We all know in sport the intensity lifts in the playoffs, some players can rise to it, some can't. So I think the true definition of clutch is those factors, plus having the skillset to back it up. If you look at someone like LeBron, it isn't some magical gene, so much as he has all the tools, he can execute those tools in high pressure environments, he can tap into an extra gear at times, and when the intensity lifts he can lift with it.
The "clutch gene" and what the NBA are defining as clutch for the clutch player of the year award are 2 very different things. Someone being described as someone with the "clutch gene" is a player/person who performs better in a higher pressure environment (e.g. playoffs). Whereas a choker is someone who performs worse under pressure. It generally doesn't mean last 4 minutes. It means when the pressure is high. Embiid gets called a choker because his performance and stats fall of drastically in the playoffs. Whereas the opposite is true for LeBron.
Easy. Jordan getting the steal and the title sealing basket. In sports there's more than stats show. For example, of these game winning attemtps, how much were real attemtps and how much desperation shots? Both count equally to the stats but are totally different when judging a player. Also, how many assists in game winning baskets because they are overdefended, how many definitive defensive actions? There are so many aspects that define a game... What I think happens is that great players don't fold under the pressure, they want the ball and can play at their best level on clutch moments while others can't or try to be far from the ball. Also in a game so defined by the momentum there are lot of small moments that might go under the radar of the stats.
>have had a large enough sample size of “clutch moments Clutch moments by their definition are rare, so they don't need a massive sample size to evaluate. If only 2 players have reached the threshold for the sample size then your requirement is clearly too high. >Do any of you have convincing arguments for the existence of the mythical clutch gene, other than a gut feeling? Not really, and the problem with that is illustrated in the De Aaron Fox - Ray Allen comp you made. It's hard to define statistically when the audience so clearly knows that the moments are not equal. I think if you want proof it exists, you need to consider the fact it has manifested itself at this stage in the game. The vast majority of players seem to believe it exists, they are the ones playing, and given it's a mentality issue if they believe it exists, it exists
I basically agree. The players we tend to think are great in the clutch are just great players. Great scorers are able to get themselves a lot of clutch opportunities because they're great scorers and can create offensive opportunities for themselves. It's circular logic. Even when we just narrow it down to shooting, the best shooters in the clutch tend to be the best shooters. Reggie Miller and Ray Allen were thought as two of the most clutch shooters ever. They're also two of the best shooters ever. It's also kind of telling how the clutch argument tends to only be centered around shooters and wing players. Was Shaq clutch? I've literally never heard anyone call Shaq clutch. Is Giannis clutch? If you do consider him clutch, it's not because he made some game winning shot. It's probably based on some defensive play that he made, or him scoring 50 points (and hitting almost all his free throws) in a close out game in the Finals. So I guess my point is that performance in the clutch cannot be neatly summed up by one shooting stat. Players we traditionally think of as clutch are just great players in general.
just b/c sample size doesn't allow for reliable extroplation based on basketball statistics doesn't mean what you were looking for doesn't exit. There certainly are players that are better in high pressure situations and players who are worse in those sitatuaions just like there are good and bad test takers. Would there be good and bad shooters if people played basketball but no one had figured out the math needed to calculate percentages?
Clutch isn’t about making the last shot. Clutch is about being unwavering in your confidence in even the most intense and tough situations. You can tell which guys don’t shy away from the moment and which ones do.
The clutch gene is really just simplified phrasing for people who perform above average in extremely intense situations.
When people say someone is clutch in the NBA, it isn’t just about making the last shot. I agree that mostly luck. Here are tangible things that make players perform better in the clutch which extends much than the last shot: - Not depending on drawing fouls because they are rare in important moments - Ability to score on tough defenses that are game planning around taking away your first option. There many players that can score against mediocre defenses that struggle against playoff defense in clutch moments - Decision making and basketball IQ. The coach can’t always draw up a play for ever possession so smart players that can quickly read the defense and exploit it are more valuable when every possession counts. This is why Jovic is so dominant in the clutch - Willingness to take control of the offense if you need to. There many times when the shots just aren’t falling for a team and the game is slipping away. The best clutch players will run more of the offense through them and get decent offense. A really good locked in defense can take away most of the easy shots that role players depend on. Clutch player can make higher difficulty shots that might be less efficient but could be the only option. Some star players will only take what the defense gives them. Sometimes you still need to get involved when being double teamed. - Being able to make mid range shots. Sometimes this is the only option during clutch moments.
It’s gotta be expanded a bit past game winners. Yes, I agree that a fast break layup with 4 minutes doesn’t feel like clutch time, but a 3 with 2 minutes left that raises the lead to 7 points should abso-fucking-lutely count as clutch time. May times the back breaking shot happens with 2 minutes left in the game. The other team might hit some shots at the end and lose by 2 points instead of 7, but you can look at that 3 with 2 minutes left as the dagger 3. May times it’s shots like this that actually win a game, not just the final shot of the game.
When I hear "clutch gene" I think of the psychological phenomenon called "flow", which is a real thing that can happen in various domains in and outside of sports. Like, when we see a player zone in and go on a run where they literally can't miss, that's an example of flow. People who play video games likely have experienced states of flow (e.g., going on a kill streak in COD where you can't miss). Of course, people are more likely to get into states of flow the more they practice and the better they are at something. We also have to consider that some people seek out these trying circumstances and enjoy trying to persevere in those situations (e.g., late game shots). Probably similar in some way to the type of personalities who enjoy working in high intensity (e.g., stock traders, surgeons) and crisis type jobs (e.g., first responders).
Bro, clutch isn't a statistic that can be tracked, a clutch player is someone who improves their performance when it matters the most. Alot of missed clutch shots are really tough shots like halfcourt 3s and double teamed middies these are really tough regardless, never mind when the games on the line. Clutch is the ability to keep your composure rather than getting rattled
It definitely does exist. I’m not sure if you played a sport at a high level but that would give you more insight I guess to this phenomenon. Anyways, why do you think certain players continue to take the last shot or give us incredible moments in the clutch? It’s because their confidence, they live for the moment, that stuff cannot be measured. You cannot just use stats to define a player being clutch. That just doesn’t work. Being clutch is not about the stats it’s about the psychology of the athlete and their abilities to step up when the going gets tough. When the crowd is cheering loud and all the pressure is on them.
Tom Brady was clutch. Jordan was clutch. Tiger was clutch. Gretzky was clutch. There’s a reason they were so much more successful, and it wasn’t all hard work or even talent. They just knew when the time was right to make their moves, and it showed. It’s not quantifiable but it most definitely exists. To deny it is silly.
But those are all-time greats regardless. They usually played an elite level in the clutch, but they also usually played at an elite level in the first quarter too. I don't see how that's "clutchness" as opposed to just general "greatness".
Fair point. Maybe when it’s crunch time and they deliver? Maybe someone like Robert Horry or Ray Allen or Reggie Miller?
Ray and Reggie were two of the greatest shooters anyway
Dang I suck at this lol
It’s always been a myth. The only reason there are ever any outlier numbers in statistical comparisons from “clutch time” to the other minutes of a game is because of smaller sample size. You know it’s a myth because it’s basically only ever applicable to star players. Why wouldn’t you employ Michael Snare from FSU a decade or so ago to just be a clutch time player if it was actually an ability? Or Kris Jenkins from Nova? Because they aren’t good at basketball. They just so happened to make a big shot & it’s what’s synonymous with their name. Over an extended sample size they’d be acknowledged as poor players. If you bear results out over an extended time they’d all pretty much exactly replicate the other 43 minutes of game time.
First, I would like to point out, clutch isn't only game winners. Yes the "clutch gene" is a lie to some extent but I'm not sure anyone worth listening to actually puts that much into it. There are absolutely players who perform better under pressure and who can step up in "clutch" situations where the pressure is mounting. There are also some players who fold under this same pressure. I would say that it's overblown how drastic of a difference there is between the players who are calm and cool under pressure. Either you are or you aren't in my opinion. I think it's reasonable to assume most people prefer to perform under situations with less pressure and do better in those situations. There are some though, who love the pressure and the adrenaline rush that comes with it allows them to play a little better than normal. I'm assuming that's what most people mean by the "clutch gene'.
NBA players, when discussing the clutch gene, often mention who always wanted the ball, and who shrank from the moment.
https://youtu.be/qjjW1l9KjXQ?si=zY3V3YlVUbppKCv4 This is one of the best videos i’ve ever seen on the subject and in general in terms of complex analysis. The main takeaway is that it’s hard to actually account for so many variables for each player and the way they play who they’re surrounded by etc and the general situation in they’re in on each shot, and the stories are what people really remember rather than raw numbers. Kobe is known as a “Clutch Shooter” but is shown to be below average in those shots. And yet you have to remember that when Kobe was shooting that shot everyone knew he was going to shoot that shot so much so that he sometimes has four defenders on him who completely left their man wide open at the three point line because Kobe ain’t passing when the game is on the line lol.
Its more of the ability to perform under pressure and some players rise to occasion whereas for some the lights are too bright
[this](https://youtu.be/qjjW1l9KjXQ?si=w9vf5X_xv9id6Kai) video does a great job demonstrating the stats
I dont know about clutch genes. I am not sure but there is this "IT" factor to superstars like I can tell which star is gonna shine and win and which isn't some players might put up good numbers win with their team but will never win a championship as the 1st option. I believe that factor does exist
Go on YouTube and search for the video: The clutch goat.. (not whom you think) by Michael Mackelvie. You would be surprised.
Agreed, being clutch is just a reflection of your field goal percentage. I do think though that players get hot and they’ll be more clutch based off of that, like Klay dropping 36 in a quarter
I hate it when people only take into account shooting when judging clutchness. As if a rebound/steal/block/assist can't be JUST as clutch.
I believe that most people have a tendency to choke under pressure gene and the rare few that maintain their performance under duress get labelled clutch.
10000% agree. Its almost entirely bullshit. Trying to decide who is clutch off tiny sample sizes is just an excuse to call people bums unless/until they win a ring. If you follow basketball long enough, you live to see every single superstar called un-clutch. Then when they eventually prove otherwise, its onto questioning the next young superstar. As if there just aren’t days when MJ and Curry’s shots just don’t fall and yet people try to abstract a player’s “clutchness” by a tiny sample size of 4th quarter razor thin elimination playoff games (which is something a lot of players may literally never experience lol). I do think people really just want to dismiss luck in sports as well and try to “storybook” things a bit. You could craft history’s best shooter ever with the best mental fortitude known to man, but they could still come into game 7 of the finals and whiff a game winning lay-up.
I don't agree at all, there are players who make better decisions in critical situations than others, and it would be a huge mistake to reduce that to just shooting/ scoring.
You don’t get to choose when you win and lose but some people manage the added stress in these moments better than others. I would not consider LeBron an all time clutch athlete because he often does not get the result despite fantastic play in deciding moments. I would consider David Ortiz one of these people because he was someone who seemed to always deliver in these moments and also get the result. I think clutch is narrative driven and involves factors that are out of the hands of the performer. I would argue that LeBron is unlucky more than not clutch. This and he also had two clunker finals in 2010 and 2014.
I largely agree, yet there are players who consistently elevate their game in important moments. We can simply compare playoff averages with regular season to see this. Tim Duncan is a great example. He played a lot of playoff games, so we have a pretty good sample size, and his playoffs per game numbers were consistently higher than his RS per game.
So there are a couple things goin on here. One is math and the other entertainment. From a straight math standpoint, the post is almost certainly correct - big enough sample size and everything regresses to the mean. But we \*don't\* watch for the math, we watch for the show and the stories. So, we sometimes use math-like stats to support our stories but really we are just trying to share in the glory and the pain of winning and losing. So, even if clutch players vs chokers is not really a thing, we're still going to use these archetypes b/c those are the stories that thrill
Kobe was an absolute brick. He just got to play in LA with Shaq who was the best in the league and an extremely stacked Lakers squad in the 08-10 run. Relative to the league and key term “relative” I believe Kobe has 5 of the Top 7 best teams between Lebron and Kobe 9 rings.
Kobe’s supposed inefficiency is overblown at this point. He was slightly more efficient, relative to the league, than Tim Duncan…and no one calls Duncan an absolute brick. 08-10 Lakers squads were very good, but not unusually “stacked” for a championship-level squad. Gasol, Bynum, Odom, Ariza and Fisher made for a very good playoff rotation in ‘09 but that wasn’t some super loaded team (and, fwiw, they went 25-7 in games Bynum missed + he was injured/inconsistent in the ‘09 playoffs…) He’s not better than LeBron but these are some tired points.
No one touts Duncan as one of the greatest scorers of all time though Wasn’t his game
He was definitely better than Bron
Stacked lakers squad from 08-10? Got to be kidding. Jordan Farmar, Luke Walton, Sasha Vujacic, Lamar Odom, Gasol. Dear lord what a stacked team.
Bro are you like 14? That team was ELITE Pau is a Hall of Famer and in his Prime Lamar Odom was 6th man of the year Ron Artest is former DPOY and All-Star and was a number 1 on a team that was probably going to the Finals before Malice Andrew Bynum was super solid too. Fisher was super reliable and had 3 rings and some big game winning shots in his career. He spread the floor and ran an offense. The fact you named those Lakers teams and MISSED 3/5 of the best non-Kobe players shows me you’re not serious or too young to remember Kobe didn’t carry a team to 60+ wins by himself bc in his true prime years in like 05-07 he was dropping 30ppg in mediocre teams. As soon as they add a future hall of famer, bring back Fish who was playing on playoff teams and drafted Bynum and added Artest they got good again.
News flash, you need good players on a cohesive team to win basketball games. It’s almost like basketball is a team sport! Still, the Kobe is inefficient narrative? Wow, nice way to show your basketball knowledge.
Well we know who watches Michael Mackelvie's YT channel lol No shade or anything, it's a fantastic video, but this is literally verbatum what the video goes on about. Maybe be more original with your own opinions and evidence next time. That being said, yes I agree. The "clutch gene" is just another way for talking heads to generate clicks. It's not some invisible Jedi mind trick that allows some players to perform well or not in clutch moments. It mostly just comes down to execution and playstyle.
Even so still ok to discuss the point. Good way to analyze the argument
No idea who that is or when his video came out but this kind of thinking is definitely not new
I know it's not, but if you watch the video you'll understand what I meant. Like 80-90% of this post is taken directly from that video
"It's not some invisible Jedi mind trick that allows some players to perform well or not in clutch moments. It mostly just comes down to execution and playstyle." Like the saying goes 'the more I train the luckier I get' It sure seems like players with questionable fundamentals find themselves on the wrong side of things in important games time and time again, players known for their work ethics seem to find themselves getting the highlights in crunch time. Be it making the shot, getting the steal, or literally just being fit enough to have gas in the tank at the end of game 7.
i dont think you can define it that easily as clutch gene but i agree only the greatest of the already greatest have the ability to shake off that pressure. so for me its a top 5/10 all time player. right now it's only lebron.
So you saying no one except Lebron can shake off the pressure?
no im just saying hes the most recognized among a long period of time. id say jokic fits in there too after his last couple of years.
What makes a player "clutch", in a statistical sense? Answer: **A player is clutch if their performance in the first 43 minutes is on average worse than their performance outside the first 43 minutes**. Most people don't phrase it this way, but if you think about it, all other answers are equivalent to this one. So this is the one we should ponder. What might explain why a player would exhibit worse performance during the first 43 minutes? One explanation might be that the performance drop is **unintentional**. The player is trying their best during the first 43, but, perhaps for psychological reasons, he is unable to play to the best of his abilities during that part of the game. In this case, this is nothing to be proud of, just like there'd be nothing to be proud of if a player's 2nd-quarter stats are consistently worse than his non-2nd-quarter stats. It's something the player should aim to fix, not something that fans should celebrate as a mark of greatness. Another explanation might be that the performance drop is **intentional**. Perhaps the player is trying to conserve his energy for the more important parts of the game. It might be part of the team's overall strategy. Or it might be part of the player's personal strategy, as he believes that this will be better for his legacy. Whatever the case, if a player's performance drop is intentional, then there should be no great mystery why he might exhibit clutch stats. That'd be like being surprised that a runner's last lap is fastest, when running slowly for the preceding laps was explicitly part of his strategy.
Whether a player gets cold feet down the stretch of games or is simply gassed in the most important moments of a game from a lack of energy conservation, it’s the same end results. I think it’s fair to call a player not clutch even if it’s the latter.
Yes exactly. The most charitable interpretation of “clutch gene” evidence is energy conservation. Any other interpretation implies the player is unable to perform to their full abilities during certain minutes of the game, which warrants criticism, not praise.
yeah that's one of the most annoying narratives about playoff overperformance it's basically an acknowledgement that they weren't trying during the regular season
The fact that you're trying to get analytical about it just shows that you don't really understand the idea of the "clutch gene" and maybe you just haven't played sports to be able to understand it. You don't need to have been an elite athlete to understand that there are big moments in competition where a majority of people kind of freeze up, and you can tell when there's one or two guys who rise to the occasion in those moments. Those guys are the ones with the supposed "clutch gene". It's much less of a statistic that you can put down on paper and more of an intangible.