The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(3)

Rockets interviewer: What do you know about the Houston Rockets?

Player: I know you are in Houston.

Rockets interviewer: Which foot did you hurt?

Player: I have been telling people my right foot.

Player: Coach and I did not see eye to eye.

Rockets interviewer: On what?

Player: Playing time.

Rockets interviewer: What else?

Player: He was shorter.

Ten years of grilling extremely tall people had reinforced in Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, the sense that he should resist the power of any face-to-face interaction with some other person to influence his judgment. Job interviews were magic shows. He needed to fight whatever he felt during them—especially if he and everyone else in the room felt charmed. Extremely tall people had an unusual capacity to charm. “There’s a lot of charming bigs,” said Morey. “I don’t know if it’s like the fat kid on the playground or what.” The trouble wasn’t the charm but what the charm might mask: addictions, personality disorders, injuries, a deep disinterest in hard work. The bigs could bring you to tears with their story about their love of the game and the hardship they had overcome to play it. “They all have a story,” said Morey. “I could tell you a story about every guy.” And when the story was about perseverance in the face of incredible adversity, as it often was, it was hard not to grow attached to it. It was hard not to use it to create in your mind a clear picture of future NBA success.

But Daryl Morey believed—if he believed in anything—in taking a statistically based approach to decision making. And the most important decision he made was whom to allow onto his basketball team. “Your mind needs to be in a constant state of defense against all this crap that is trying to mislead you,” he said. “We’re always trying to figure out what’s a trick and what’s real. Are we seeing a hologram? Is this an illusion?” These interviews belonged on the list of the crap trying to mislead you. “Here’s the biggest reason I want to be in every interview,” said Morey. “If we pick him, and he has some horrible problem and the owner asks, ‘What did he say in the interview when you asked him that question?’ and I go, ‘I never actually spoke to him before we gave him one point five million dollars,’ I get fired.”

And so, in the winter of 2015, Morey, along with five members of his staff, sat in a conference room in Houston, Texas, waiting for another giant. The interview room contained nothing worth seeing. A conference table, some chairs, windows obscured by blinds. On the table rested a lone coffee mug, left by mistake, with a logo—National Sarcasm Society: Like We Need Your Support. The giant was . . . well, none of the men knew all that much about him except that he was still only nineteen years old, and that he was huge even by the standards of professional basketball. He’d been discovered five years earlier in a village in Punjab by some agent or talent scout—or so they’d been told. He was then fourteen years old, seven feet tall, and barefoot—or, at any rate, wearing shoes so tattered they revealed his feet.

They’d wondered about that. The kid’s family must have been so poor that they couldn’t afford to buy him shoes. Or maybe they’d decided it was pointless to buy shoes for feet that grew so rapidly. Or maybe the whole thing was a fiction invented by an agent. Either way, what lingered in the mind was the image: a seven-foot-tall, fourteen-year-old-boy, barefoot in the streets of India. They didn’t know how the boy had found his way out of the Indian village. Somebody, probably an agent, had arranged for him to travel to the United States to learn how to speak English and play basketball.

To the NBA he was a complete unknown. There was no video of the guy playing organized basketball. He hadn’t played, so far as the Rockets could determine. He hadn’t participated in the NBA Draft Combine, the formal audition for amateur players. It was only just that morning that the Rockets had been permitted to take his measurements. His feet were size 22, and his hands, from fingertip to wrist, were eleven and a half inches, the biggest hands the staff had ever measured. Shoeless, he stood seven foot two and weighed three hundred pounds, and his agent claimed he was still growing. He’d spent the past five years in southwest Florida learning basketball—most recently at IMG, a sports academy built to turn amateurs into professionals. Although no one they knew had seen him play, the few people who had laid eyes on him were still talking about it. Robert Upshaw, for instance. Upshaw was a thick seven-foot center who had been dismissed from his team at the University of Washington and was now auditioning for NBA teams. A few days earlier, in the Dallas Mavericks gym, he’d worked out with the Indian giant. Hearing from the Rockets scouts that he might be about to do it again, Upshaw’s eyes went wide and his face lit up and he said, “The dude is the biggest human being I’ve ever seen. And he can shoot the three-ball! It’s crazy.”



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Back in 2006, when he was hired to run the Houston Rockets and figure out who should play pro basketball and who should not, Daryl Morey had been the first of his kind: the basketball nerd king. His job was to replace one form of decision making, which relied upon the intuition of basketball experts, with another, which relied mainly on the analysis of data. He had no serious basketball-playing experience and no interest in passing himself off as a jock or a basketball insider. He’d always been just the way he was, a person who was happier counting than feeling his way through life. As a kid he’d cultivated an interest in using data to make predictions until it became a ruling obsession. “That always seemed the coolest thing to me,” he said. “How do you use numbers to predict things? It was like a cool way to use numbers to be better than other people. And I really liked being better than other people.” He built forecasting models the way other kids built model airplanes. “It was always sports I was trying to predict. I didn’t know what else to apply it to—what, am I going to forecast my grades?”