“Most people stop looking when they find the proverbial needle in the haystack. I would continue looking to see if there were other needles.”
– Albert Einstein
I read a story in my youth that I cannot seem to now corroborate in my not-so-youth, about a contest they’d had in Kansas in the 50’s to literally find a needle in a haystack. I remember that the winner and both runner-ups had worked with magnets, and the gent who set his on fire finished fourth. I think. Big points for creativity, though. Finding an actual needle in an actual haystack. It’s a fascinating problem, akin to many of life’s “where do I even start to get my arms around this?” dilemmas. Some of those are huge aspects of life, like “who should I spend my life with?” or “what am I meant to be when I grow up?”. I didn’t find the answer to that latter one until I was 40, and am grateful to have ever found it at all. I have friends who spend their whole lives combing through that particular career haystack, only to never have the needle show up. How frustrating.
I was reminded of this type of exercise in futility when I read Henry Abbott’s column of two months back about the failure rate of NBA draftees, at least for the clubs that drafted them. If you didn’t read it or click through just now, the upshot is that only 6% of players drafted by their teams go on to become stars for that same team. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still very excited to see the play of Mssrs. Brazile and Hopkins, both Denver Nuggets second rounders, who have both had some nice moments in Summer League so far. But that statistic makes the odds of either of them being a young superstud for the Nuggets more than a bit of a longshot. Especially given how well Denver has hit on second-rounders in their past. Nikola Jokic make have used up all of their statistical probability in a single swath. Talk about bucking the odds.
Turns out this math issues is not simply applicable basketball, not by a long shot. Abbott’s research also references a piece by Steve Magness that looks across a wide gamut of sports – he was looking hard at soccer with the current World Cup commanding so much attention – and that 6% success rate sits in the middle of most sports, and outperforms some of them wildly (including soccer, whose success rates for kids promoted into almost any countries’ player advancement system is truly tragic). It’s certainly not for a lack of trying. A lot of pride and dollars comes back to the teams and sports and countries who get those equations right… and still for all the “knowledge” surrounding it all, it’s almost as much a crap shoot as taking a best guess at the roulette wheel. Hell, for some sports, the statistical rate of advancing the most talented players is so low, you’d be better off actually playing roulette.
It’s reminiscent of the scene in Moneyball where the A’s scout team is sitting around telling Billy Beane to leave the decision-making and player-recommending them, to tell him which picks to make, as they “know”. 24 years after the events of the movie took place, and all these scads of data later, and no one still “knows”. Hell, the Rockies have half the Moneyball braintrust now in their front office. Will that change how much more sure they can be about the players they select? Time will tell.
And maybe it’s not so random as happenstance. These guys certainly do know some things. Speaking of those same Rockies, no one had rightfully given them a shot at winning it all this year, and those experts all turned out to be right. There is a lot the experts playing the games behind the games DO know. You know? It just so happens that they only have so much of it figured out, and it looks like being right about talent selection is almost universally NOT known. Unknown? They don’t knowed it.
It sure is a rarity to find one. A star, that is. Only a little less rare than finding a needle in a haystack, even if you burn your haystacks down. Maybe one of the best things going for Colorado sports these days is that the Avs, Broncos, Nuggets, and yes, even those Rockies have some bonafide star-level players that they found and have (so far) kept. Maybe those high-altitude haystacks are a little easier to sort through somehow?
