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.”
* * *
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?”
His interest in sports and statistics had led him, at the age of sixteen, to pick up a book called The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. Bill James was then busy popularizing an approach, rooted in statistical reasoning, to thinking about baseball. With some help from the Oakland Athletics, that approach would trigger a revolution that ended with nerds running, or helping to run, virtually every team in Major League Baseball. In 1988, when he stumbled upon James’s book in a Barnes & Noble, Morey had no way of knowing that people with a gift for using numbers to predict things would overrun professional sports management and everyplace else high-stakes decisions were being made—or that basketball would be, in effect, waiting for him to grow up. He simply suspected that the established experts maybe didn’t know as much as everyone thought they did.
That particular suspicion had been born the year before, 1987, after Sports Illustrated splashed his favorite baseball team, the Cleveland Indians, on its cover and picked them to win the World Series. “I was like, ‘This Is It!!!! The Indians have sucked for years. Now we’re going to win the World Series!’” The Indians finished that season with the worst record in the major leagues: How did that happen? “The guys they had said were going to be so good were so bad,” recalled Morey. “And that was the moment when I thought: Maybe the experts don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Then he discovered Bill James and decided that, like Bill James, he might use numbers to make better predictions than the experts. If he could predict the future performance of professional athletes, he could build winning sports teams, and if he could build winning sports teams . . . well, that’s where Daryl Morey’s mind came to rest. All he wanted to do in life was to build winning sports teams. The question was: Who’d let him do it? In college he’d sent dozens of letters to professional sports franchises in the hope of being offered some menial job. He received not a single reply. “I didn’t have, like, any way to penetrate organized sports,” he said. “So I decided at that point that I had to be rich. If I was rich I could just buy a team and run it.”
His parents were middle-class midwesterners. He didn’t even know any rich people. He was also a distinctly unmotivated student at Northwestern University. He nevertheless set out to make enough money to buy a professional sports team, so that he might make the decisions about who would be on it. “Every week he’d take a sheet of paper and write on top, ‘My Goals,’” recalls his then-girlfriend, Ellen, now his wife. “The biggest life goal was, ‘I’m going to someday own a professional sports team.’” “I went to business school,” said Morey, “because I thought that’s where you had to go if you wanted to get rich.” Upon leaving business school, in 2000, he interviewed with consulting firms until he found one that got paid in the shares of the companies it advised. The firm was advising Internet companies during the Internet bubble: That sounded, at the time, like a way to get rich quick. Then the bubble burst and all the shares were worthless. “It turns out it was the worst decision ever,” said Morey.
From his stint as a consultant he learned something valuable, however. It seemed to him that a big part of a consultant’s job was to feign total certainty about uncertain things. In a job interview with McKinsey, they told him that he was not certain enough in his opinions. “And I said it was because I wasn’t certain. And they said, ‘We’re billing clients five hundred grand a year, so you have to be sure of what you are saying.’” The consulting firm that eventually hired him was forever asking him to exhibit confidence when, in his view, confidence was a sign of fraudulence. They’d asked him to forecast the price of oil for clients, for instance. “And then we would go to our clients and tell them we could predict the price of oil. No one can predict the price of oil. It was basically nonsense.”
A lot of what people did and said when they “predicted” things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, “It’s impossible to know for sure.” “What will the price of oil be in ten years?” was such a question. That didn’t mean you gave up trying to find an answer; you just couched that answer in probabilistic terms.