NBA teams overlooked Jeremy Lin for the same reason so-called experts first ignore stocks, business pioneers and anything else that defies expectations.
“We are just not as smart as we think we are,” said Bill James, the statistician and author who inspired Billy Beane of “Moneyball” fame to choose baseball players by new standards.
Lin’s rise from scrub to a Knicks savior has provided a lesson in valuation far beyond sports. He went undrafted after college and was cut twice before the season. Yet he scored more points in his first five starts than any player in NBA history while leading the Knicks to seven straight victories.
How could this have happened?
Those paid to secure the top talent missed the signs of Lin’s worth for years. But if Apple could fire Steve Jobs, then it makes sense that the metrics by which we measure a basketball player could fail as well, experts told The Huffington Post.
“The human tendency is to think in terms of a model,” said Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “We have a model for what a basketball player should look like, be like and act like. It’s the same for what a good firm model or stock might look like. Occasionally, our preconceived notions are shattered.”
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as a Chinese friend is happy to point out .. “they missed him cause he’s Chinese”