What does it mean to love the game?

Reading Time: 3 Minutes

Every year during the NBA draft, the same question would come up:

“Does this guy really love basketball?”

It’s a good question. Understanding someone’s motivation to perform in elite and competitive conditions can provide insight into their potential for success.

The problem arises when we take this question too far, searching for signs of love in “body language” or whether the athlete is in the gym at 4 am. We can misread body language (we’ve all felt misunderstood) and attribute 4 am gym trips to love when it might be a poor coping strategy (cutting off sleep after a 10:30 game time end is a bad call).

How do we know if someone loves the game? Does it matter for greatness?

Finding Love

It’s valuable to search for players who love the game. At the highest levels of sport, it’s hard. You need something to drive long-term motivation despite setbacks and failures.

I viewed this through the framework of obsessive vs. harmonious passion.

Obsessive passion is driven by outside forces and external pressure. It’s the pro in the game because their parents hope to retire from their play, or the pro who feels unworthy of love unless she wins gold. Though obsessive passion can look motivated (it predicts deliberate practice and improves performance), it comes with costs: burnout, stress, and poor behavior.

Harmonious passion is driven from within. It’s an intrinsic drive to improve at something you love. It’s the pro who plays for the joy of the game, wants to become the best, and is willing to work for it. It also predicts deliberate practice and improved performance, and comes with benefits like increased well-being, emotional stability, and motivation.

The problem with looking for these two types of passion is that they look similar. In draft interviews, an obsessive passion can sound like a big “why” driving someone forward. You end up believing you’ve nailed what’s motivating someone but have no clarity on how that motivation will show up long-term in your team. And you’re a smart interviewee, you’ll say you love the game whether you do or not.

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What to look for instead

What’s harder to assess but more valuable to discover is the 3 facets of intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation leads to harmonious passion - and if it’s absent, you can assume any passionate behavior might be obsessive.

Intrinsic motivation breaks down into:

• Autonomy: the player feels in control of their path.

• Mastery: the player enjoys getting better.

• Relatedness: the player enjoys being part of the team and contributing to something bigger.

You can discover whether a player has these attributes in interviews, through observation, and by talking with former coaches. It’s a more complex question than “Does he/she love the game?”, but the complex question will yield a richer answer about how to work with the player to be successful.

You can ask about times they took control over their development (autonomy) or reflect on their growth as a player (mastery). Ask about their role as a teammate (relatedness - verify with teammates). These questions will point you toward real behaviors, which you can expect to see (or not) in your environment.

An intrinsically motivated player will focus on “becoming the best player they can be.” You’ll see their commitment in their actions, treatment of teammates, and show up each day.

Note the difference between loving something and becoming the best at it. There may be some overlap in the Venn diagram of these concepts, but it isn’t 100%. You don’t have to love something to want to be great, and you don’t have to want to be great to love something.

Driven to be the best

You’re trying to solve for an indomitable will to become the best version of themselves.

Those who’ve worked in the draft and pro sports for a while know most pros don’t care to become the best. They want to get paid, support their family, and stay involved with a game that’s given them a lot. It’s a blend of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation that keeps them engaged but not working diligently enough to reach their full potential.

To get it right, stop searching for love and start searching for a quest for excellence. The truly generational greats will stop at nothing to be on their sports’ Mt. Rushmore and the conversation about the GOAT. These players are few and far between, but like anything, it’s a spectrum.

The closer you get to getting it right, the better your team will be.

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Shoutout to Rachel Webb (sport psych for the Charlotte Hornets) for the inspiration for this edition.

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