Our Myths About Competitiveness
On Kobe, LeBron, and the ongoing Giannis saga
The central figure in the NBA right now is Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Giannis1 is the third best player in the league. He won MVPs in 2019 and 2020, and a title in 2021, but his teams have cratered since even as he’s maintained his level of play. His incompetent management has tried and failed repeatedly to improve the roster, but Vegas gives them a 1% chance to win next year’s title and their future is bleaker.
Giannis’s two options are to return or demand a trade. Stars that demand trades usually go where they want, and the top four teams in his conference can each make good offers2 without nuking their team. If he landed on any of them, his team would be the prohibitive conference favorite, and ~15-20% odds to win each of the next 2-3 titles.
Giannis is reportedly struggling with this decision. He’s been in Milwaukee for 12 seasons and his family is settled there. He’s currently in Greece, “closely monitoring” the situation.
I find this situation fascinating. The question in front of Giannis is a deep one, and a challenge of his competitive spirit.
Giannis is nominally “ultra-competitive”. The evidence of that? He exerts maximum effort on every play. He is in ludicrously good shape and, reputably, an incredibly hard worker. He plays to physically emasculate his opponents. He snarls and talks trash. He won’t practice with other stars since he worries it will dull his thirst for annihilation. He brags about how he’d compete the same way against his wife3.
I admire Giannis’ intensity, his work ethic, and the violence with which he approaches his work. All are marks of intense competitiveness.. but this macho-man perception misses something essential. To me, competitiveness - the willingness to ignore all other priorities in the pursuit of victory - has two parts.
The first, I’ll call “win-small”, or “intra-contest” competition. It refers to everything you do to maximize your chance of victory once that contest begins. For basketball, that’s giving maximum effort and laser focus for the entire game, diving for every loose ball, and taking advantage of the rules. Giannis is elite at this.
The second is “win-big”, or “inter-contest” competition. This is everything you do between contests to maximize your chance of winning the next one. The most obvious part is how you prepare yourself to be better able to compete: fitness training, skill building, etc. The less obvious and more impactful part is how you stack the deck in your favor. What skills are you training? What teammates do you bring with you? What contests are you picking? Do you have the capacity, and will, for long-term thinking and focus?
In this sense, competitiveness is an iceberg – the small part you can see is the “win-small” side, but 90% of the outcome is decided by the “win-big” side4. Giannis will be the same player next year no matter what team he plays on, but his title odds will change by 20x if he stacks the deck in his favor. He can’t do a single “win-small” thing that changes it by more than 1-2%.
Almost every professional athlete is ruthlessly “win-small” competitive. But what separates the elite ones is how far they go into the “win-big” section.
Giannis’ idol is Kobe Bryant, the biggest example of how “win-small” is confused for “win-big”. The “Black Mamba” was a showman for the macho, work-at-all-hours style of winning. He practiced at 2 AM and went back at 6. He worked out 3 times a day and let you know. He was famously keen to embarrass his opponents and competed with manic intensity. But where I struggle with the Kobe legacy is in how many parts of the game he actively stacked the deck against himself.
In the early 2000s, he spent many years trying to persuade his coach to trade Shaquille O’Neal - the best player in the league. In between, he called Shaq fat and lazy both behind the scenes and in public as “motivational tactics”
With the option as a 2004 free agent of re-joining a terrible Lakers team with no other talent, or joining a better team and sharing the spotlight, he stayed in LA and prompted won 49% of his games over the next 3 years
He actively refused to recruit quality teammates to his team
He spent his entire career prioritizing the least effective shot in basketball (the long 2) over shooting 3s
His last error is particularly galling - changing the way he played and practicing the shot more would have improved him 100x more than getting in extra workouts. But all of these incidents are Kobe putting his personal comforts above the team. Working out 3 times a day wasn’t hard for Kobe. Being a decent guy was.
Giannis shouldn’t look up to Kobe. He should emulate LeBron.
LeBron is deeply misunderstood. His competitiveness has been impugned throughout his career by veterans who worship in the Kobe church (including MJ!). But while I think Jordan was the better player, LeBron is the more competitive one. No player in NBA history has tried as hard as he has to win championships. Giannis should take note.
The first point in LeBron’s favor is his body. Through incredible discipline and determination, LeBron has extended his career to give himself 23 chances to win the title. For nearly 20 of those seasons, he was a top-5 player in the NBA (one benchmark for title contention). That’s probably 20-30% more than anyone else in history. Who else in NBA history was putting $1.5M a year into their body? Kobe’s body broke down at 34. MJ retired at 34.
But the better arguments for LeBron are about what he did to stack the deck in his favor. While Jordan’s and Kobe’s teams had great managers, LeBron was drafted by a team of incompetent officials. He left at his first real opportunity, recruiting two top-10 players to form a “super team” in Miami. This is often held as a criticism of his competitive spirit. I see the willingness to share, to defer, and to recruit as a true desire to win.
After four years (and two titles) in Miami, LeBron recognized the team’s bleak future and left for the best situation in Cleveland. He then bucked wisdom again, signing a one year contract. He would repeat this for the next three seasons, threatening his team every year to leave when the season ended if they didn’t do everything to improve it. This forced them to exchange future value (young players, draft picks) for present value (better teammates. All to help him win championships ASAP. He made the Finals four times in Cleveland, winning once. When he left, he immediately deployed the same playbook at the next spot.
LeBron gets massive credit in my unofficial competitiveness ledger for thinking outside of the box and bending the rules of the game5. No player in NBA history has done anything like this before or since. His choices invited heavy amounts of ridicule. They also created massive amounts of risk - with a career-ending injury, LeBron would have given up tens of millions in future earnings. Many players can do a version of Kobe’s work ethic, but nobody has been willing to put winning above money the way LeBron did.
Giannis is 30. NBA mortality hits in a big way in a player’s early 30s, giving him a 3-6 year window (depending on how he holds up) to compete for titles. I love watching him, and want to see him competing late in May and June, when the championship is decided.
I hope he wants that too.
Going by your first name is a right of passage for the greats. The criteria seem to be that your name has to be unusual - Kareem, Luka, Moses, Shaq, Wilt, LeBron, Hakeem, Kobe - but also cool, since Steph Curry (first name Wardell) and Magic Johnson (first name Earvin) don’t make the cut.
The rough framework, exact mechanics left to the salary cap experts:
- NYK: Towns, McBridge + picks
- CLE: Garland, Allen, Merrill, picks
- ATL: Jalen Johnson, Milwaukee’s 2026/2027 picks
- ORL: Wagner, Black, picks
Relatable!
To take some more general examples:
Negotiation: 10% is what you say during the negotiation, 90% is getting a better offer / positioning yourself better from the start
Farming: 10% squeezing the most from your seeds, 90% putting them down in the right plot of land
Kickboxing? (as Tim Ferriss proved)
Hiring: 10% being able to screen candidates, 90% being able to attract great ones
The closest comparison in my mind comes from outside sports. Whenever I think of LeBron, I think of Taylor Swift. T-Sizzle has spent her entire career shattering industry norms that didn’t serve her in pursuit of her goals. Like LeBron, she found unique ways to leverage her fame (re-recording her albums outside the music label; directly re-negotiating rates with streaming carriers and ticket resellers; self-recording her own films) in ways no artist before or since would do. Both won massively because of it.