Morey could see—or thought he could see—how the model had been fooled by Joey Dorsey. Its blindness to the value of DeAndre Jordan was far more troubling. The kid had played a single year of college basketball, not very effectively. It turned out that he had been a sensational high school player, had hated his college coach, and didn’t even want to be in school. How could any model predict the future of a player who had intentionally failed? It was impossible to see Jordan’s future in his college stats, and, at the time, there were no useful high school basketball statistics. So long as it relied almost exclusively on performance statistics, the model would always miss DeAndre Jordan. The only way to see him, it seemed, was with the eyes of an old-fashioned basketball expert. As it happens, Jordan had grown up in Houston under the eyes of Rockets scouts, and one of those scouts had wanted to draft him on the strength of what appeared to him undeniable physical talent. One of his scouts had seen what his model had missed!
Morey—being Morey—had actually tested whether there were any patterns in the predictions made by his staff. He’d hired most of them and thought they were great, and yet there was no evidence any one of them was any better than the other, or the market, at predicting who would make it in the NBA and who would not. If there was any such thing as a basketball expert who could identify future NBA talent, he hadn’t found him. He certainly didn’t think that he was one. “Weighting my personal intuition more heavily did not cross my mind,” he said. “I trust my gut very low. I just think there’s a lot of evidence that gut instincts aren’t very good.”
In the end, he decided that the Rockets needed to reduce to data, and subject to analysis, a lot of stuff that had never before been seriously analyzed: physical traits. They needed to know not just how high a player jumped but how quickly he left the earth—how fast his muscles took him into the air. They needed to measure not just the speed of the player but the quickness of his first two steps. That is, they needed to be even more geeky than they already were. “When things go wrong, that’s what people do,” said Morey. “They go back to the habits that succeeded in the past. My thing was: Let’s go back to first principles. If these physical tools are going to matter, let’s test them more rigorously than they’ve ever been tested before. The weights we placed on production in college had to go down, and the weights we placed on raw physical abilities had to go up.”
But once you started to talk about a guy’s body and what it might or might not be able to do on an NBA court, there was a limit to the usefulness of even the objective, measurable information. You needed, or seemed to need, experts to look at the tools in action and judge how well they would function playing a different game, against better competition. You needed scouts to rate a player’s ability to do the various things they knew were most important to do on a basketball court: shooting, finishing, getting to the rim, offensive rebounding, and so on. You needed experts. The limits of any model invited human judgment back into the decision-making process—whether it helped or not.
And thus began a process of Morey trying as hard as he’d ever tried at anything in his life to blend subjective human judgment with his model. The trick wasn’t just to build a better model. It was to listen both to it and to the scouts at the same time. “You have to figure out what the model is good and bad at, and what humans are good and bad at,” said Morey. Humans sometimes had access to information that the model did not, for instance. Models were bad at knowing that DeAndre Jordan sucked his freshman year in college because he wasn’t trying. Humans were bad at . . . well, that was the subject Daryl Morey now needed to study more directly.
Freshly exposed to the human mind, Morey couldn’t help but notice how strangely it operated. When it opened itself to information that might be useful in evaluating an amateur basketball player, it also opened itself to being fooled by the very illusions that had made the model such a valuable tool in the first place. For instance, in the 2007 draft there had been a player his model really liked: Marc Gasol. Gasol was twenty-two years old, a seven-foot-one center playing in Europe. The scouts had found a photograph of him shirtless. He was pudgy and baby-faced and had these jiggly pecs. The Rockets staff had given Marc Gasol a nickname: Man Boobs. Man Boobs this and Man Boobs that. “That was my first draft in charge and I wasn’t so brave,” said Morey. He allowed the general ridicule of Marc Gasol’s body to drown out his model’s optimism about Gasol’s basketball future, and so instead of arguing with his staff, he watched the Memphis Grizzlies take Gasol with the 48th pick of the draft. The odds of getting an All-Star with the 48th pick in the draft were well below one in a hundred. The 48th pick of the draft basically never even yielded a useful NBA bench player, but already Marc Gasol was proving to be a giant exception.§ The label they’d stuck on him clearly had affected how they valued him: names mattered. “I made a new rule right then,” said Morey. “I banned nicknames.”
* * *
All of a sudden he was right back in the mess he and his model had been hired to eliminate. If he could never completely remove the human mind from his decision-making process, Daryl Morey had at least to be alive to its vulnerabilities. He now saw these everywhere he turned. One example: Before the draft, the Rockets would bring a player in with other players and put him through his paces on the court. How could you deny yourself the chance to watch him play? But while it was interesting for his talent evaluators to see a player in action, it was also, Morey began to realize, risky. A great shooter might have an off day; a great rebounder might get pushed around. If you were going to let everyone watch and judge, you also had to teach them not to place too much weight on what they were seeing. (Then why were they watching in the first place?) If a guy was a 90 percent free-throw shooter in college, for instance, it really didn’t matter if he missed six free throws in a row during the private workout.
Morey leaned on his staff to pay attention to the workouts but not allow whatever they saw to replace what they knew to be true. Still, a lot of people found it very hard to ignore the evidence of their own eyes. A few found the effort almost painful, as if they were being strapped to the mast to listen to the Sirens’ song. One day a scout came to Morey and said, “Daryl, I’ve done this long enough. I think we should stop having these workouts. Please, just stop doing them.” Morey said, Just try to keep what you are seeing in perspective. Just weight it really low. “And he says, ‘Daryl, I just can’t do it.’ It’s like a guy addicted to crack,” Morey said. “He can’t even get near it without it hurting him.”