One of the most annoying things in sports fandom and sports discussion – or rather, two of the most annoying things – is people denying that chokers exist, and people misusing choking.
To cut to the chase, choking is a real thing. There are players whose quality of play drops in the playoffs, especially as the stakes get higher. A choke-artist is a player whose quality of play routinely declines in the playoffs – and who sometimes has horrific performances, usually multiple times.
We’ve seen players like this before – we all have. What makes it worse is that often times, in those games, their team didn’t even play all the badly. It’s harsh to have to use a an example here, since these are still great players, but a textbook example is James Harden – Harden has a record for playoff games shooting under 25%. And has typically had a lot of turnovers in those games.
People misuse choking, however. A player that has not won ring yet in their career or never won, is not inherently a choker. For instance, right now, Josh Allen is not a playoff choker. He has overall been a really solid playoff performer. He’s really only played poorly in just one of his playoff performances. He played incredible in 2021 against Kansas City, and led a go-ahead touchdown drive with 13 seconds left before his defense gave up a field goal, and never forced a stop in overtime. If Allen has more games like the 2022 divisional round against the Bengals, where he is overthrowing his #1 receiver Stefon Diggs who got open, multiple times, then we may be able to apply this label. (It’s all about sample size.)
Now here’s the interesting thing. Certain “chokers”, may sometimes choke because actually flaws in their game have been exposed. If a player with a certain skillset comes gets exposed in the playoffs, this can cause them to also have many bad playoff games.
