“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.
At the bottom of the transformation in decision making in professional sports—but not only in professional sports—were ideas about the human mind, and how it functioned when it faced uncertain situations. These ideas had taken some time to seep into the culture, but now they were in the air we breathed. There was a new awareness of the sorts of systematic errors people might make—and so entire markets might make—if their judgments were left unchecked. There were reasons basketball experts could not see that Jeremy Lin was an NBA player, or could be blinded to the value of Marc Gasol by a single photograph of him, or would never see the next Shaquille O’Neal if he happened to be an Indian. “It was like a fish not knowing he is breathing water unless someone points it out,” Morey said of people’s awareness of their own mental processes. As it happens, someone had pointed it out.
* * *
* Hunter actually started for the Celtics for a season and went on to a successful career in Europe.
? There’s no perfect way to measure the quality of a draft choice, but there’s a sensible one: comparing the player’s output in his first four years, the years the NBA team that drafts him also controls him, to the average output of players drafted in that slot. By that measure, Carl Landry and Aaron Brooks were the 35th and 55th best picks of the six hundred or so picks made by NBA teams in the last decade.
? Before the 2015 season, DeAndre Jordan signed a four-year contract with the Clippers that guaranteed him $87,616,050, then the NBA’s maximum salary. Joey Dorsey signed a one-year deal for $650,000 with Galatasaray Liv Hospital of the Turkish Basketball League.
§ Gasol became a two-time All-Star (2012, 2015) and, by Houston’s reckoning, the third-best pick made by the entire NBA over the past decade, after Kevin Durant and Blake Griffin.
? In 2015 Tyler Harvey, a shooting guard out of Eastern Washington, made the rounds. When asked whose game his most resembled, he said, “To be honest with you, I’m most like Steph Curry,” and he would go on to say that, as had been the case with Steph Curry, big colleges had taken no interest in him. A total lack of appeal to college basketball coaches was now a good thing! Harvey was taken late in the second round of the draft with the 51st overall pick. “If Curry doesn’t exist, no way he [Harvey] is drafted,” said Morey.
** They made the trade, and then used the draft pick as the biggest chit in a deal to land a superstar, James Harden.
?? As of this writing, it is still too early to tell.
2
THE OUTSIDER
Of Danny Kahneman’s many doubts the most curious were the ones he had about his own memory. He’d delivered entire semesters of lectures straight from his head without a note. To his students he’d seemed to have memorized entire textbooks, and he wasn’t shy about asking them to do it, too. And yet when he was asked about some event in his past, he’d say that he didn’t trust his memory and so you shouldn’t, either. Possibly this was a simple extension of what amounted to Danny’s life strategy of not trusting himself. “His defining emotion is doubt,” said one of his former students. “And it’s very useful. Because it makes him go deeper and deeper and deeper.” Or maybe he just wanted another line of defense against anyone hoping to figure him out. In any case, he kept at a great distance the forces and events that had shaped him.
He might not trust his memories, but he still had a few. For instance, he remembered the time in late 1941 or early 1942—at any rate, a year or more after the start of the German occupation of Paris—when he was caught on the streets after curfew. The new laws required him to wear the yellow Star of David on the front of his sweater. His new badge caused him such deep shame that he took to going to school half an hour early so that the other children wouldn’t see him walking into the building wearing it. After school, on the streets, he’d turn his sweater inside out.