The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(11)

“Sorry, I mean basketball skills. Like on the floor.”

“Post game,” he said. He said other things but they were unintelligible.

“Who do you think you are most like in the NBA—similar in terms of game?” asked Morey.

“Jowman and Shkinoonee,” said Singh, without missing a beat.

A silence followed. Then Morey realized. “Oh, Yao Ming.” Another pause. “Who was the second one?”

“Shkinoonee.”

Someone made a guess: “Shaq?”

“Shaq, yes,” said Singh, relieved.

“Oh, Shaquille O’Neal,” said Morey, finally getting it.

“Yes, same body type and same post-up,” said Singh. Most players compared themselves to someone they actually looked like. Then again, there was no NBA player who looked like Satnam Singh. If he made it, he’d be the league’s first Indian.

“What do you got around your neck there?” Morey asked.

Singh grabbed his dog tags and stared down at his chest. “This is my family names,” he said, fingering one. Then he took the second dog tag and simply read what it said: “I miss my coaches. I love ball. Ball is my life.”

That he needed a dog tag to remind him wasn’t the best sign. A lot of big guys played just because they were big. Long ago some coach or parent had yanked them onto a basketball court, and social pressure kept them there. They were less likely than small players to work hard to improve, and more likely to take your money and fade away. It wasn’t that they were consciously deceitful; it was that the sort of big kid who had played basketball his entire life mainly to please others had become so practiced at telling people what they wanted to hear that he didn’t know his own heart.

At length, Singh left the interview room. “Have we found evidence he has played organized basketball anywhere?” Morey asked, once he was gone. You couldn’t control how you felt about the player after the interview, but you could use data to control the influence of those feelings. (Or could you?)

“They say he played at the IMG Academy in Florida.”

“I hate these kinds of bets,” said Morey. He’d watch Singh work out for thirty minutes, but his decision was already made. They had no data on him. Without data, there’s nothing to analyze. The Indian was DeAndre Jordan all over again; he was, like most of the problems you faced in life, a puzzle, with pieces missing. The Houston Rockets would pass on him—and be shocked when the Dallas Mavericks took him in the second round of the NBA draft. Then again, you never knew.??

And that was the problem: You never knew. In Morey’s ten years of using his statistical model with the Houston Rockets, the players he’d drafted, after accounting for the draft slot in which they’d been taken, had performed better than the players drafted by three-quarters of the other NBA teams. His approach had been sufficiently effective that other NBA teams were adopting it. He could even pinpoint the moment when he felt, for the first time, imitated. It was during the 2012 draft, when the players were picked in almost the exact same order the Rockets ranked them. “It’s going straight down our list,” said Morey. “The league was seeing things the same way.”

And yet even Leslie Alexander, the only owner with both the inclination and the nerve to hire someone like him back in 2006, could grow frustrated with Daryl Morey’s probabilistic view of the world. “He will want certainty from me, and I have to tell him it ain’t coming,” said Morey. He’d set out to be a card counter at a casino blackjack table, but he could live the analogy only up to a point. Like a card counter, he was playing a game of chance. Like a card counter, he’d tilted the odds of that game slightly in his favor. Unlike a card counter—but a lot like someone making a life decision—he was allowed to play only a few hands. He drafted a few players a year. In a few hands, anything could happen, even with the odds in his favor.

At times Morey stopped to consider the forces that had made it possible for him—a total outsider who could offer his employer only slightly better odds of success—to run a professional basketball team. He hadn’t needed to get rich enough to buy one. Oddly enough, he hadn’t needed to change anything about himself. The world had changed to accommodate him. Attitudes toward decision making had shifted so dramatically since he was a kid that he’d been invited into professional basketball to speed the change. The availability of ever-cheaper computing power and the rise of data analysis obviously had a lot to do with making the world more hospitable to the approach Daryl Morey took to it. The change in the kind of person who got rich enough to buy a professional sports franchise also had helped. “The owners often made their money from disrupting fields where most of the conventional wisdom is bullshit,” said Morey. These people tended to be keenly aware of the value of even slight informational advantages, and open to the idea of using data to gain those advantages. But this raised a bigger question: Why had so much conventional wisdom been bullshit? And not just in sports but across the whole society. Why had so many industries been ripe for disruption? Why was there so much to be undone?

It was curious, when you thought about it, that such a putatively competitive market as a market for highly paid athletes could be so inefficient in the first place. It was strange that when people bothered to measure what happened on the court, they had measured the wrong things so happily for so long. It was bizarre that it was even possible for a total outsider to walk into the game with an entirely new approach to valuing basketball players and see his approach adopted by much of the industry.