The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(9)
Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things. Over and again in the draft you saw these crystal-clear pictures form in the minds of basketball experts which later proved a mirage. The picture in virtually every professional basketball scout’s mind of Jeremy Lin, for instance. The now world-famous Chinese American shooting guard graduated from Harvard in 2010 and entered the NBA draft. “He lit up our model,” said Morey. “Our model said take him with, like, the 15th pick in the draft.” The objective measurement of Jeremy Lin didn’t square with what the experts saw when they watched him play: a not terribly athletic Asian kid. Morey hadn’t completely trusted his model—and so had chickened out and not drafted Lin. A year after the Houston Rockets failed to draft Jeremy Lin, they began to measure the speed of a player’s first two steps: Jeremy Lin had the quickest first move of any player measured. He was explosive and was able to change direction far more quickly than most NBA players. “He’s incredibly athletic,” said Morey. “But the reality is that every fucking person, including me, thought he was unathletic. And I can’t think of any reason for it other than he was Asian.”
In some strange way people, at least when they were judging other people, saw what they expected to see and were slow to see what they hadn’t seen before. How bad was the problem? When Jeremy Lin’s coach at the New York Knicks finally put him in the game—because everyone else was injured—and allowed him to light up Madison Square Garden, the Knicks were preparing to release Jeremy Lin. Jeremy Lin had already decided that if he was released he’d simply quit basketball altogether. That’s how bad the problem was: that a very good NBA player would never have been given a serious chance to play in the NBA, simply because the minds of experts had concluded he did not belong. How many other Jeremy Lins were out there?
After the Houston Rockets and everyone else in the NBA neglected to see Jeremy Lin’s value in the draft (he signed after the draft as a free agent), the league shut down. A dispute between players and owners led to a lockout, and no one was allowed to work. Morey enrolled in an executive education course at Harvard Business School and took a class in behavioral economics. He’d heard of the discipline (“I’m not an idiot”) but had never studied it. At the start of the first class, the professor asked him and everyone else in the class to write down the last two digits of their cell phone on a sheet of paper. Then she asked the class to write down their best estimate of the number of African countries in the United Nations. Then she collected all the papers and showed them that the people whose cell phone numbers were higher offered systematically higher estimates of African countries in the United Nations. Then she took another example and said, “I’m going to do it again. I’m about to anchor you. Here. See if you aren’t screwed up.” Everyone had been warned; everyone’s minds remained screwed up. Simply knowing about a bias wasn’t sufficient to overcome it: The thought of that made Daryl Morey uneasy.
When the NBA returned to work he made yet another unsettling discovery. Just before the draft, the Toronto Raptors called and offered to trade their high first-round draft pick for Houston’s backup point guard, Kyle Lowry. Morey talked about it with his staff, and they were on the brink of not doing the deal when one of the Rockets executives said, “You know, if we had the pick we’re thinking of trading for and they offered Lowry for it, we wouldn’t even consider it as a possibility.” They stopped and analyzed the situation more closely: The expected value of the draft pick exceeded, by a large margin, the value they placed on the player they’d be giving up for it. The mere fact that they owned Kyle Lowry appeared to have distorted their judgment about him.** Looking back over the previous five years, they now saw that they’d systematically overvalued their own players whenever another team tried to trade for them. Especially when offered the chance to trade one of their NBA players for another team’s draft picks, they’d refused deals they should have done. Why? They hadn’t done it consciously.
Morey thus became aware of what behavioral economists had labeled “the endowment effect.” To combat the endowment effect, he forced his scouts and his model to establish, going into the draft, the draft pick value of each of their own players.
The next season, before the trade deadline, Morey got up before his staff and listed on a whiteboard all the biases he feared might distort their judgment: the endowment effect, confirmation bias, and others. There was what people called “present bias”—the tendency, when making a decision, to undervalue the future in relation to the present. There was “hindsight bias”—which he thought of as the tendency for people to look at some outcome and assume it was predictable all along. The model was an antidote to these vagaries of human judgment, but, by 2012, the model seemed to be approaching a limit to the informational edge it would give the Rockets in valuing players. “Every year we talk about what to take out and what to put in the model,” said Morey. “And every year it gets a little more depressing.”
This job of running a professional basketball team had turned out to be a bit different than he had imagined, back when he was a kid. It was as if he had been assigned to take apart a fiendishly complicated alarm clock to see why it wasn’t working, only to discover that an important part of the clock was inside his own mind.