Morey and his staff had obviously seen a lot of big men. But in the winter of 2015, even they were shocked by the sight of the Indian who walked into their interview room. He was dressed simply in sweatpants and a lime-green Nike T-shirt, with a pair of dog tags dangling from his neck. That neck—like his hands, his feet, his head, and even his ears—was so cartoonishly immense that you found your eyes jumping from feature to feature and wondering if that specific body part broke a Guinness book record. The Rockets once employed a seven-foot-six-inch Chinese center named Yao Ming whose size provoked these weird reactions in others. People would see him and turn and run, or burst out laughing, or weep. From head to toe the Indian was a few inches shorter than Yao Ming, but in every other way he was bigger. After seeing his measurements, and finding it hard to believe anyone could grow so much in just nineteen years, Morey had asked his staff to dig out his birth certificate. The Indian’s agent had come back and said that the village in which he’d been born kept no birth records. Hearing this, Morey recalled what Dikembe Mutombo had once told him. Mutombo was a seven-foot-two-inch shot blocker who had come to the Rockets by way of Congo, with stops in between at five other NBA teams. He said that whenever some huge guy from overseas turned up claiming to be a lot younger than he looked, “You need to cut open his legs and count the rings.”
The Indian’s name was Satnam Singh. In all but his size he seemed young. He had the social uncertainty of an adolescent confused to find himself suddenly so far away from home. He smiled nervously and lowered himself into the chair at the head of the table.
“You doing all right?” said the Rockets interviewer.
“Yeah, I’m good good good.” It wasn’t a voice but a foghorn. So guttural it took a moment to work out what he’d said.
“We just want to get to know you a bit better,” said the interviewer. “Tell us about your agent and why you selected him.”
Satnam Singh rambled on nervously for a couple of minutes. It was unclear whether anyone in the room followed what he said. They gathered that he’d basically been taken care of since he was fourteen by people who imagined an NBA career for him.
“Tell us about where you are from and your family?” the interviewer asked.
His father worked on a farm. His mother was a cook. “I came here, I can’t speak English,” he said. “I could not speak to anyone. It was very hard for me. Nothing. Zero.” As he struggled to relate the incredible story of his journey from his eight-hundred-person Indian village to the front office of the Houston Rockets, his eyes searched the room for approval. The executives of the Houston Rockets were ciphers. Not unfriendly, but not giving up anything, either.
“What would you say your basketball strengths are?” asked the interviewer. “What are you best at?”
The Rockets interviewer read from a script. Singh’s answers would be entered into the Rockets database, compared to the answers given by a thousand other players, and studied for patterns. They still clung to the hope that they might one day measure character, or at least get a sense how a poor kid would behave after he’d been handed millions of dollars and, usually, a seat on the bench. Would he keep working hard? Would he listen to coaches?
Morey hadn’t found anyone—inside or outside basketball—who could answer those questions, though there was no end to psychologists who pretended to be able to. The Rockets had hired a bunch of them. “It’s been horrible,” says Morey. “A horrible experience. Every year I think there’s got to be something there. Every year we find someone with a different approach. Every year it is totally pointless. And every year we try again. I’m starting to think psychologists are complete charlatans.” The last psychologist who showed up claiming to be able to predict behavior had essentially used the Myers-Briggs personality test—and then tried to persuade Morey, after the fact, that he had warded off all manner of unseen problems. The way he’d gone on reminded Daryl Morey of a joke. “The guy walks around with a banana in his ear. And people are like, ‘Why do you have a banana in your ear?’ He says, ‘To keep the alligators away! There are no alligators! See?’”
The Indian giant said his strengths were his post-up game and his midrange shooting.
“Have you broken any team rules while at IMG?” asked the interviewer.
Singh was confused. He didn’t understand the question.
“No problems with the police?” Morey said helpfully.
“No fighting?” asked the interviewer.
Singh’s face cleared. “Never!” he exclaimed. “Never in my life. I’ve never tried. If I tried, somebody would die.”
The Rockets executives had been studying Singh’s body. One of them finally couldn’t contain himself. “Have you always been so tall?” he asked, going off script. “Or was there an age when you started to grow up faster?”
Singh explained that he was five foot nine at the age of eight and seven foot one at the age of fifteen. It ran in the family. His grandmother was six foot nine . . .
Morey stirred in his seat. He wanted to get back to questions that might lead to predictions. He asked, “What have you improved the most at—what can you do well now that maybe you didn’t do as well two years ago?”
“I feel most badly on my mind. My mind.”
“Sorry, I mean basketball skills. Like on the floor.”
“Post game,” he said. He said other things but they were unintelligible.
“Who do you think you are most like in the NBA—similar in terms of game?” asked Morey.
“Jowman and Shkinoonee,” said Singh, without missing a beat.
A silence followed. Then Morey realized. “Oh, Yao Ming.” Another pause. “Who was the second one?”
“Shkinoonee.”
Someone made a guess: “Shaq?”
“Shaq, yes,” said Singh, relieved.
“Oh, Shaquille O’Neal,” said Morey, finally getting it.
“Yes, same body type and same post-up,” said Singh. Most players compared themselves to someone they actually looked like. Then again, there was no NBA player who looked like Satnam Singh. If he made it, he’d be the league’s first Indian.
“What do you got around your neck there?” Morey asked.
Singh grabbed his dog tags and stared down at his chest. “This is my family names,” he said, fingering one. Then he took the second dog tag and simply read what it said: “I miss my coaches. I love ball. Ball is my life.”
That he needed a dog tag to remind him wasn’t the best sign. A lot of big guys played just because they were big. Long ago some coach or parent had yanked them onto a basketball court, and social pressure kept them there. They were less likely than small players to work hard to improve, and more likely to take your money and fade away. It wasn’t that they were consciously deceitful; it was that the sort of big kid who had played basketball his entire life mainly to please others had become so practiced at telling people what they wanted to hear that he didn’t know his own heart.
At length, Singh left the interview room. “Have we found evidence he has played organized basketball anywhere?” Morey asked, once he was gone. You couldn’t control how you felt about the player after the interview, but you could use data to control the influence of those feelings. (Or could you?)
“They say he played at the IMG Academy in Florida.”