The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(5)

Morey already had a crude statistical model to evaluate amateur players. He’d built it on his own, just for fun. In 2003 the Celtics had encouraged him to use it to pick a player at the tail end of the draft—the 56th pick, when the players seldom amount to anything. And thus Brandon Hunter, an obscure power forward out of Ohio University, became the first player picked by an equation.* Two years later Morey got a call from a headhunter who said that the Houston Rockets were looking for a new general manager. “She said they were looking for a Moneyball type,” recalled Morey.

The Rockets’ owner, Leslie Alexander, had grown frustrated with the gut instincts of his basketball experts. “The decision making wasn’t that good,” Alexander said. “It wasn’t precise. We now have all this data. And we have computers that can analyze that data. And I wanted to use that data in a progressive way. When I hired Daryl, it was because I wanted somebody that was doing more than just looking at players in the normal way. I mean, I’m not even sure we’re playing the game the right way.” The more the players got paid, the more costly to him the sloppy decisions. He thought that Morey’s analytical approach might give him an edge in the market for high-priced talent, and he was sufficiently indifferent to public opinion to give it a whirl. (“Who cares what other people think?” says Alexander. “It’s not their team.”) In his own job interview, Morey was reassured by Alexander’s social fearlessness, and the spirit in which he operated. “He asked me, ‘What religion are you?’ I remember thinking, I don’t think you’re supposed to ask me that. I answered it vaguely, and I think I was saying my family were Episcopalians and Lutherans when he stops me and says, ‘Just tell me you don’t believe any of that shit.’”

Alexander’s indifference to public opinion turned out to come in handy. Learning that a thirty-three-year-old geek had been hired to run the Houston Rockets, fans and basketball insiders were at best bemused and at worst hostile. The local Houston radio guys instantly gave him a nickname: Deep Blue. “There’s an intense feeling among basketball people that I don’t belong,” said Morey. “They remain silent during periods of success and pop up when they sense weakness.” In his decade in charge, the Rockets have had the third-best record of the thirty teams in the NBA, behind the San Antonio Spurs and the Dallas Mavericks, and have appeared in the playoffs more than all but four teams. They’ve never had a losing season. The people most upset by Morey’s presence had no choice at times but to go after him in moments of strength. In the spring of 2015, as the Rockets, with the second-best record in the NBA, headed into the Western Conference Finals against the Golden State Warriors, the former NBA All-Star and current TV analyst Charles Barkley went off on a four-minute tirade about Morey during what was meant to be a halftime analysis of a game. “. . . I’m not worried about Daryl Morey. He’s one of those idiots who believe in analytics. . . . I’ve always believed analytics was crap. . . . Listen, I wouldn’t know Daryl Morey if he walked in this room right now. . . . The NBA is about talent. All these guys who run these organizations who talk about analytics, they have one thing in common: They’re a bunch of guys who ain’t never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school and they just want to get in the game.”

There’d been a lot more stuff just like that. People who didn’t know Daryl Morey assumed that because he had set out to intellectualize basketball he must also be a know-it-all. In his approach to the world he was exactly the opposite. He had a diffidence about him—an understanding of how hard it is to know anything for sure. The closest he came to certainty was in his approach to making decisions. He never simply went with his first thought. He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

One of the first things Morey did after he arrived in Houston—and, to him, the most important—was to install his statistical model for predicting the future performance of basketball players. The model was also a tool for the acquisition of basketball knowledge. “Knowledge is literally prediction,” said Morey. “Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally everything you do you’re trying to predict the right thing. Most people just do it subconsciously.” A model allowed you to explore the attributes in an amateur basketball player that led to professional success, and determine how much weight should be given to each. Once you had a database of thousands of former players, you could search for more general correlations between their performance in college and their professional careers. Obviously their performance statistics told you something about them. But which ones? You might believe—many then did—that the most important thing a basketball player did was to score points. That opinion could now be tested: Did an ability to score points in college predict NBA success? No, was the short answer. From early versions of his model, Morey knew that the traditional counting statistics—points, rebounds, and assists per game—could be wildly misleading. It was possible for a player to score a lot of points and hurt his team, just as it was possible for a player to score very little and be a huge asset. “Just having the model, without any human opinion at all, forces you to ask the right questions,” said Morey. “Why is someone ranked so high by scouts when the model has him ranked low? Why is someone ranked so low by scouts when the model has him ranked high?”