What Was Kyle Korver?

Kyle Korver's year ended with a shooting drought, a high ankle sprain, and the Atlanta Hawks getting swept out of the playoffs by the depleted Cavaliers. But the image that will endure from the 34-year-old's breakout season—something even more indelible than the weirdness of a player enjoying a NBA breakthrough in his mid-thirties—will be of two shoulders square to the basket, legs shoulder-width apart, a basketball spinning off his fingertips as defenders lurch at his chest in futile exhaustion. This is what Kyle Korver has been, and has done, for 11 NBA seasons. If he seemed more transcendently so this year, it had less to do with him and more to do with how the Hawks—and the NBA—have changed to make players like him even more valuable.

Korver caused more terror away from the ball than any other player in the league, and his defense-bending 49.2 percent shooting from three-point distance propelled the Hawks to their best season since the franchise moved to Atlanta. Before Korver, no player who averaged 12.1 points per game and played average defense had garnered widely agreed-upon All-Star acclaim. He did that, and in so doing joined a club of lionized marksmen like Ray Allen and Stephen Curry. Kyle Korver, the same dude who started all of ten NBA games over the six seasons that would ordinarily represent a player's prime.

Famed images of great shooters—think of Allen's shooting motion split into fourteen pieces, Curry stopping on a dime and pulling up for three—aren't just pretty; they're instructive. Shooting, as we've come to understand it, is a quest for ritualistic improvement: less joint movement, a millisecond off the release, a percentage point of accuracy, a more perfect union. In each new picture, Curry elevates into a realized product while the old frames fade behind him. Allen's split-second shooting motion is deconstructed into fourteen equally mastered pieces, implying the meticulous attention to detail we ascribe to great shooters, their romanticized workaday routines—Ray Allen ate chicken and rice and got up 300 shots before every game!—proof of their inevitable triumph.

Workout-wise, Korver sings the praises of P3—Peak Performance Project, which mapped his body's weaknesses and realigned his motions for peak health and efficiency—and 'misogi', a Japanese ritual that suggests, in his modern terms, "once a year you do something that you're not sure you can do." (This year, that meant carrying a heavy rock underwater.) Korver has indeed become the post-Allen standard-bearer for twilighters chasing perfection, but he has not done it in the way his predecessors have.

That Korver is willing to do tremendous work for miniscule improvement is commendable, and he is absolutely the author of his brilliant season, but the sea change that made his arrival possible—and what made his season-ending injury so devastating to the Hawks—came from how his team used him, which in turn reflected broader trends in the league. With an increased emphasis on three-point shots, movement-heavy offenses and scheme-oriented over-helping defenses, the tide is now carrying that rock with Korver. His in-between game and isolation defense improved, but more importantly, they ceased to matter as much. The game's stylistic stars aligned for Korver this season, and he did not miss his opportunity. He didn't create it himself, either.

Korver's breakout season was a product of both context and agency, although we naturally tend to emphasize the latter. When Korver is hot, the merciless repetition of his shooting stroke takes on its own sort of logic; shots go in and go in and suddenly hauling a boulder underwater seems to make sense. When Korver dunked for the first time in two years, it was easy to think, "Hey, maybe P3 worked!" An old sports truism reemerged, as such things do: that hard work can fill the gap between who you are and who you could be.

But regression is undefeated, and there is only so much one person can change. If Korver's successes were inextricably tied to his work ethic, so too were his failures. The game seemed to get away from him even before his injury. In the postseason, Korver went cold, connecting on a bleak 35.5 percent from deep; defenses still zoned in on him, but the Hawks needed Korver to make shots, not just space the floor. JR Smith hit a three with Korver draped all over him and TNT's Chris Webber mused, "Okay, he doesn't respect Kyle Korver." Korver hit a stepback jumper, but Iman Shumpert flopped and drew the charge; the announcing crew laughed, "That's exactly what you get when he puts the ball on the floor."

Few players of Korver's skill endure such indignities on the regular, which is a reminder that while Korver did things like P3 and misogi, he also needed them. All the stories about Korver's workouts that elevated him also proved that he was never anything but human—not a super-elite talent or lab-grown state-of-the-art athlete, just an extremely good basketball player in the right system at the right time. No player this season was simultaneously a testament to human achievement and human frailty. Kyle Korver, in the end, was more like us than anyone reckoned.