The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

The first chapter largely focuses on Darryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets professional basketball team, and how his decision-making approach represents a paradigm shift in the world of professional sports. Morey is portrayed as an outsider, not a former NBA player or coach himself, but a tenacious hard-worker in search of better decision-making mechanisms. After working for the Boston Celtics and incorporating algorithms into the organization’s decision making, Morey was invited to work for the Rockets as their new general manager. The Rockets “were looking for a Moneyball type” (30), Morey recalls. Fed up with imprecise decision making, Rockets owner Leslie Alexander wanted to hand over the reins of his team to someone who relied on a more analytical approach.

Basketball insiders, such as Charles Barkley, were skeptical, even infuriated over Morey’s hiring. Yet Morey persisted, confidently depositing hope in his own process for decision making. He may have been a basketball nerd, but his idea of nerd was simply “a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it” (31). For any professional sports team, decisions about which players to draft, trade, or sign to multiyear, multimillion dollar contracts have serious consequences, and Morey was determined to make the right ones.

Today, Morey still works for the Rockets. Lewis explains his success in this role:

“In his decade in charge, the Rockets have had the third-best record of the thirty teams in the NBA, behind the San Antonio Spurs and the Dallas Mavericks, and have appeared in the playoffs more than all but four teams. They’ve never had a losing season” (31).

Yet Morey’s successes also come with failures, most notably when the Rockets passed on Marc Gasol, who they had internally nicknamed “Man Boobs.” Though Morey’s algorithm indicated that Gasol would be a successful NBA player, optics and subjective judgment prevented the Rockets from drafting him. Gasol went on to become three-time NBA All-Star. The Rockets also initially passed on Jeremy Lin, an Asian American player who appeared to pass the algorithm test but didn’t pass the subjective judgment test, though the team later signed him in 2012.

In conclusion, Lewis writes that Morey’s story as GM of the Rockets illustrates how “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” (51).