Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey recalls some of his biggest mistakes in the NBA draft. In 2007, the Rockets passed on Marc Gasol after the team’s scouts had found a photo of the pudgy Spaniard shirtless and given him the nickname “Man Boobs.” Three years later, the Rockets (and every other team) failed to select Jeremy Lin because, like Gasol, the Chinese-American guard from Harvard didn’t fit their mental image of an NBA player. In both cases, the basketball players had shown up in Morey’s statistical model as highly desirable draft candidates, but he and his colleagues allowed biases to cloud their judgment. And in both cases, the model had it right.
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