“Be true to the data.”
As the biggest city in a politically neutral country, Stockholm was an exceptionally strange place to experience World War II. It was close enough to battlefields that it was a safe haven for spies and diplomats but far enough that everyday life there felt almost normal. “To a traveler who has seen bomb-pitted Britain,” one foreign correspondent wrote, “Stockholm seems a little bit of heaven.”1 Swedes still went to concerts and the opera. They still went dancing in tuxedos and gowns. And they still went to the movies.
In the bitter winter of 1942, the hottest movie in Stockholm was “Pimpernel” Smith, a film about a swashbuckling professor on a covert mission to free concentration camp prisoners. It was banned in Sweden for being too political, but the fact that it was banned didn’t mean it was hard to find. This censorship actually had the opposite effect. It only made even more people want to see it. To keep up with the demand, the British embassy hosted a screening of “Pimpernel” Smith, and one of the people who came to watch a hero battle evil was a young man named Raoul Wallenberg. He walked out that night feeling overwhelmed by inspiration.
“That,” he said, “is something I would like to do.”2
But he was never supposed to do anything like that. Raoul Wallenberg belonged to a family that was the Rockefellers of Sweden. to be—not to be seen was the motto on their crest. Raoul was always different from other Wallenbergs, though. He never enjoyed the comforts of aristocracy. His father died when his mother was pregnant with him, and he made a deathbed wish for the son he would never meet: “I will be happy if only little Baby becomes a nice and good and simple person.”3 Raoul was nice and good. He was anything but simple. He was groomed from a young age by his paternal grandfather, a Swedish ambassador who understood the importance of being worldly and empathetic, which was the reason he shipped Raoul to the University of Michigan to study in a wholesome American environment. “The conviction here at home that we are better than anyone else needs to be shaken,” he wrote in a letter to his grandson, later adding, “A trailblazer discovers the good to be found out there among the foreigners.”4
Wallenberg’s time out there among the foreigners left him idealistic and wildly ambitious. He knew he wouldn’t be in the United States forever and drenched himself in Americana while he could. Wallenberg was unpretentious about his travels around this foreign country. He derived a special pleasure from hitchhiking, and he took pains to assure his grandfather that it wasn’t beneath someone of his family’s stature to ask random strangers for a ride. “Hitchhiking gives you training in diplomacy and tact,” he wrote in a letter.5 “As for the risks, they’re probably exaggerated.” But not always. He was robbed at gunpoint one night while hitching back from Chicago and surprised himself when he found the whole thing unusually thrilling. He turned out to be so cool under pressure that it unnerved his assailants.
What he couldn’t have possibly realized was that he was getting valuable experience training for another job—one that was far more daring than anything his grandfather had in mind.
After he graduated with a degree in architecture, Wallenberg kept traveling the world, and he continued to immerse himself in the local cultures wherever he went. As he sharpened his keen sense of place wandering South Africa and the land that would one day be Israel, he developed a fondness for the Jewish people he encountered along the way. He admired them so much that he started bragging about one of his distant relatives, his maternal grandmother’s paternal grandfather, who technically made Raoul Wallenberg one-sixteenth Jewish.
As he spent more time out there among the foreigners, he began to think he didn’t want to follow the path his grandfather had set for him. He wouldn’t allow himself to be another Swedish banker. He couldn’t “sit around saying no to people,” as he once put it.6 Wallenberg had bigger aspirations. He wanted to leave behind a legacy beyond his family crest. He craved a purpose. And then a purpose happened to present itself.
When he finally moved back to Sweden, Wallenberg found himself in the business of buying goose meat. His first assignment was to visit Budapest. He came back with disturbing news. For one thing, he didn’t have fifty tons of goose meat, which had been the reason for his visit in the first place. But the more important takeaway was that something appeared to be deeply wrong in Hungary. The spread of anti-Semitism was obvious to anyone who bothered paying attention. One of those people was a fur trader named Norbert Masur. He was troubled enough by the situation in Europe that in April 1944, one month before the first of more than six hundred thousand Hungarians would be deported to death camps, he wrote a letter to his local rabbi. “We should find a person, highly skilled, of good reputation, a non-Jew, who is willing to travel to Romania/Hungary in order to lead a rescue mission for the Jews,” Masur wrote.7
The word of Masur’s letter reached Wallenberg. This was the job for which his grandfather had inadvertently groomed him. He applied to be a hero.
At almost exactly the same time, the War Refugee Board of the United States sent urgent telegrams to embassies in five neutral countries looking for the type of person Masur was seeking. The Americans wanted as many diplomats as possible in Hungary as quickly as possible. Sweden was the only country that was interested in helping. And there was only one Swede for the job.
Raoul Wallenberg was officially named a Swedish diplomat a few days after the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944. No one seemed to care that he wasn’t only working for Sweden or that he wasn’t technically a diplomat.
His life as he knew it was over from the minute he stuffed a windbreaker, a sleeping bag, and a revolver into his knapsack. Wallenberg was in a rush. He couldn’t bear the idea of being in Sweden for any longer. “Every day costs human lives,” he told his superiors.8 His train rumbled into Budapest in July 1944, and he was immediately briefed on the humanitarian efforts already under way.
Wallenberg learned that the Swedish embassy had been distributing official documents to protect Jews from persecution, and these provisional Swedish passports spared people from internment, deportation, and the safety risks of wearing yellow stars to announce themselves as Jewish. As long as they had official Swedish documents, they could identify themselves as neutral Swedish citizens. The passports had been mildly successful, but there weren’t nearly enough of them, only hundreds for hundreds of thousands of endangered Jews. “I think I’ve got an idea for a new and maybe more effective document,” Wallenberg said.9
He called it the Schutzpass (of course the Germans had a word for “protective passport”), and his rule was that anyone in possession of a Schutzpass would be fully protected by the diplomatic powers of neutral Sweden. At first he made 1,500. And then 2,500. And then 4,500. And then so many that he stopped counting.10
The early Schutzpasses were reserved for Hungarian Jews with legitimate Swedish connections, the kinds of people who might plausibly have such papers, but soon the demand exceeded the supply to the point there was a black market for the passports. There were two things that made this development all the more remarkable. The first was that the Schutzpasses were free. The second was that the Schutzpasses were fake. “Not even the name Sweden was written in Swedish on what claimed to be an official Swedish document,” wrote Ingrid Carlberg, one of Wallenberg’s biographers.11 There was nothing even remotely official about this document. In this sense the Schutzpass was like Wallenberg himself: it looked and acted the part, and everyone played along. Wallenberg’s allies were amazed the Nazis could be so impressed by something that was so fake. But that was the one convenient thing about fighting a war against people attracted to evil causes: a great many of them were fools. They could be easily duped by anything that implied authority.
It wasn’t long before Wallenberg unilaterally declared that the application process for Schutzpasses had become too burdensome. The Nazis were brutally efficient killing machines. Their accelerating genocide left him no time for diplomatic niceties. And because he wasn’t a diplomat, he wasn’t interested in being nice anyway. He issued orders to approve every Jew who applied for Swedish papers even if he couldn’t find Sweden on a map. Wallenberg had been right about himself all those years ago. He did have the potential to do something more than say no to people. “If anyone is capable of making their way to our door and submitting an application for a protective passport,” he told his staff, “the answer from now on will always be yes.”12
That decision was how Raoul Wallenberg turned out to be one of the greatest heroes in the history of mankind. What he accomplished in the next six months was nothing short of superhuman. There are few people who have ever done so much good in so many ways in so little time.
At this point you might be thinking, What in the good name of goose meat does Raoul Wallenberg have to do with the hot hand? We’ll get to that.
But first let’s marvel at his many acts of bravery. He plunged into icy waters to rescue Jews as Nazis were shooting at them. He packed twenty thousand people into safe houses that were designed for five thousand people.13 He pulled Jews off trains bound for death camps with his bare hands. He used all the skills he’d collected over the course of his eclectic life and some that he wasn’t aware he possessed. He was so tireless that he slept only four hours a night.14 He was so charming that he managed to befriend the wife of Hungary’s Far Right foreign minister. He was so persuasive that she gave her husband an ultimatum one night at the dinner table: honor Wallenberg’s protective passports or lose her forever. He hurled china at her, claimed betrayal, stormed out, but eventually agreed to her demands.15
It seems impossible that one person could have pulled any of this off in a lifetime. Wallenberg did all this in a few months. He saved approximately one hundred thousand human lives with the power of his imagination.
The culmination of his period of unimaginable courage was a rather surreal confrontation with his rival. One night near the end of the war, at the height of their conflict, Wallenberg had dinner with the Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was obsessed with Wallenberg. He referred to him as “that Jew-dog Wallenberg”—as in “have that Jew-dog Wallenberg shot.”16 On one side of the dinner table was a man who represented the banality of evil. On the other side was a man who personified the ingenuity of good.
They put aside their differences to eat and drink brandy together, and they retreated to the living room when it was time for coffee. Wallenberg opened the curtains to look outside. The night sky was red. They could see artillery fire as the Russians inched toward Budapest. It was at this point when Wallenberg felt it was the right time to tell Eichmann that the Nazis would never win the war. “I admit that you are right,” Eichmann said, to the shock of everyone in the room.17 But only after abandoning the very cause that he embodied did Eichmann put a chill on the evening with an ominous warning to Wallenberg. “Accidents do happen,” Eichmann said. “Even to a neutral diplomat.” There was no need for any more coffee. Wallenberg couldn’t feign the coolness that he felt upon being robbed while hitchhiking to Ann Arbor. But even if he was terrified, the only way he knew to cope was to keep working around the clock. “Of course it gets a little scary sometimes,” he told one of his colleagues. “But for me there’s no choice.”18
The Red Army sieged Budapest a few days after their dinner, and Wallenberg spied an opportunity in this shifting of power. He’d dreamed about helping rebuild the city once the worst was over. It was a reconstruction that seemed possible in the same way that everything he’d achieved in the last six months had been. When he was awakened early one morning in January 1945 to the sound of Russian street patrols, he demanded to speak with top Soviet authorities so he could pitch them his plan. Wallenberg expected to be gone for at least a week to meet with a Soviet military commander in Debrecen, Hungary. He left on January 17, the day after the liberation of Budapest’s ghetto, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. He was increasingly unsure if he should trust the armed Soviet officers assigned to be his ushers. “I do not know if I am a guest or a prisoner,” he said.19
What he also did not know was that the Soviet Army had secretly issued an order for his arrest.
They continued to assure him that he was a guest, not a prisoner, when his train left Budapest. As concerned as he must have been, he may have believed them. He distracted himself in his train car by working on a spy novel that he’d begun writing. But when the train pulled into Moscow, he was escorted to a building on Lubyanka Square. It was the headquarters of the Russian ministry of security. He thought he would be there for the night.
Raoul Wallenberg walked inside and disappeared forever.
This chapter is not about Raoul Wallenberg. Not really, anyway. It’s about the search for truth about the hot hand. It’s about coming to smarter conclusions about what we know and don’t know and think we should know but don’t. It’s about data, but it’s not about bigger data. It’s about better data.
Which brings us to another couple of Israelis who met in an extremely Israeli way. Gal Oz happened to know someone from the army who happened to be married to someone who happened to study with a professor who happened to be friendly with Miky Tamir. Tamir was more accomplished than Oz if only because Tamir was more accomplished than pretty much everyone in his orbit. He was a nuclear physicist who published scholarly papers about drones one day and drafted top secret classified documents the next. After several decades working for research centers and defense contractors, Tamir reinvented himself as a serial entrepreneur, and this was perhaps the most deeply Israeli thing he could’ve done. Israel was a country where not knowing someone with a start-up was about as likely as never having eaten hummus. By the time he met Oz, a young engineer in the Israeli Defense Forces, Tamir had successfully launched several companies and was starting to think about his next big idea. Oz thought he could help. He specialized in Tamir’s field of visual intelligence. They both knew how to use maps and data from satellite and aerial imagery to inform decisions. They both could see things before everyone around them. But what their shared expertise really meant was that once Oz spread the word he was leaving the military, it would only be a matter of time before he was introduced to Tamir. “Israel is small,” Oz says. “Everybody knows each other.”
Tamir wanted to bring all the futuristic technology from their field of visual intelligence to an industry that needed all the help it could get: sports. He didn’t have to convince Oz of the potential. “I saw sports from the tech side,” Oz says, “and it was more or less the same as what I did in the army.” The origin story that persisted after they started SportVU—as in a different way to view sports—was that the company was based on proprietary Israeli missile-tracking technology. It wasn’t true, but they didn’t see the harm in letting the myth take on a life of its own, partly because it added to the intrigue about their company, but mostly because Israeli missile-tracking technology wasn’t too different from what they were actually doing. “Tracking a missile is much easier than tracking a ball,” Oz says. “A missile is much more predictable.”
SportVU quickly caught the attention of another company on the cutting edge of sports called Sports Team Analysis and Tracking Systems—STATS for short. STATS executives believed that player tracking was the future of their business, but they didn’t have the manpower to build such technology by themselves. They would have to acquire it. Before they spent millions of dollars to buy SportVU, however, they needed to know a whole lot more about the company. They asked a team that included a man named Brian Kopp to investigate.
A born-and-bred Midwesterner with a buzz cut, Kopp had never worked in sports before. He’d spent a few years in banking and private equity before he, too, decided that he didn’t want to say no to people for a living. He enrolled in business school and took a job in strategic planning for an education company. “Because of course that’s what you do before you get into player tracking in sports,” he says. The next hairpin turn in his career brought him to STATS. He was still new on the job when his bosses told him to get on a plane to Israel and meet some guys named Miky and Gal who were supposedly applying missile-tracking technology to sports. “And so I went,” he says. “I didn’t know what the hell we were doing.”
He read the book Start-up Nation on the plane to learn more about the entrepreneurial spirit of this country where he’d never been. But he was still unsure about whom he was meeting and why they were meeting when he touched down in the bustling tech hub of Tel Aviv in 2008. He still couldn’t wrap his head around his own company’s strategy. It was only apparent to him in retrospect.
“It was very simple,” he says. “Can we use technology to collect data that no one else has access to?”
Tamir and Oz gave Kopp a tour of the SportVU office. It didn’t take long: the SportVU office was one room. “It was just a couple of guys doing something interesting,” Kopp says. But it was becoming clear that this company, which had only dabbled in soccer and had a name that reminded him of visiting the optometrist, was developing technology with the potential to radically transform professional sports. This isn’t fully baked yet, Kopp thought. But there’s something here. And we’ll get it early. STATS took his advice and bought SportVU. It cost $18 million. Tamir took his cut and moved on to find the next next big thing. Oz’s job was to build SportVU. Kopp’s job was to sell SportVU to sports that weren’t soccer. He knew exactly where to start: basketball.
What made basketball so popular was also what made it so difficult to quantify. It was a balletic exercise in outrageous athleticism. How could anyone put a number on the perpetual action taking place over 4,700 square feet of space with ten players and a leather ball in constant, intertwined, and unpredictable motion? Well, with an elaborate tracking system based on something not unlike Israeli missile-tracking technology. That was Kopp’s pitch when he was invited to the NBA Finals in 2009 to present to the league’s top executives. When he started thinking about how he could tell them about SportVU, he decided that he had to show them instead. SportVU’s engineers flew to Orlando and positioned their cameras to record the action on the court down below. The game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Orlando Magic was on a Tuesday night. Their presentation was on Thursday afternoon. They pulled all-nighters to search for the one tidy example that would stupefy their audience.
They found it early in the first quarter with a play featuring the two largest people on the court. Andrew Bynum, the center for the Lakers, made a nifty spin move and tried a hook shot. Dwight Howard, the center for the Magic, came swooping across the lane and swatted the shot away. The referees had to make a snap decision: Was it a legal block or an illegal goaltend?
The question of whether the ball was already on the way down was almost impossible to discern in real time. The referees had milliseconds to make a judgment call that came down to millimeters. SportVU’s employees had days to make an informed, objective decision based on robust data. Their cameras had been tracking the ball the whole time. Since they had the precise coordinates of its path, they could determine if the referees were right.
Those referees who were entrusted to officiate games in the NBA Finals had ascended to the top of their profession because of the way they had been trained to use their eyes, their intuition, and their own systems of pattern recognition to make calls. There had never been a better option. But now the referees didn’t have to make educated guesses based on their years of experience. They didn’t have to process the play while running it through a database in their minds with millions of similar plays. And they didn’t have to do it in a matter of milliseconds. In the same way that players and teams would soon use SportVU to determine strategies, the referees could make decisions based on what the data told them, not what they happened to believe, because what they happened to believe had the potential to be shaped by all the biases they carried with them as human beings.
Kopp was about to show the NBA’s senior executives that there was a better way. It was a means of injecting empiricism into a field rife with ambiguity. What he didn’t know was if anyone would be willing to listen. He feared none of them would be at the presentation. He was surprised when all of them crowded into a cramped hallway that had been curtained off for the occasion. There were even some team officials who’d invited themselves to Orlando not for the Finals game that night but for the presentation from Kopp that afternoon. They watched as he rolled out a television monitor to replay Dwight Howard’s possible goaltend of Andrew Bynum. The screen showed a digital re-creation of the ball with the x, y, and z coordinates of its arc toward the basket. SportVU calculated the height of the ball by measuring its distance from the ground on a frame-by-frame basis. The height of the ball was decreasing when Howard blocked Bynum’s shot. It had already reached its apex. This meant the referees had made the right call: it was a goaltend.
SportVU would become so advanced in the coming years that Kopp is almost embarrassed about how rudimentary it was when he pitched the NBA. “It was like the Pong version of video games,” he says. “What we showed was like boop boop boop boop boop.” But the league’s most powerful people were blown away. They wanted the NBA to be in business with SportVU.
The deal talks lasted for months even though the company didn’t know what to charge or what it was providing and the league didn’t know what to pay or what it was getting. SportVU was more of a promise than a real product at that point. “We were trying to negotiate the values of something that didn’t exist,” Kopp says. As they reached the finish line of all their haggling, the floating heads of NBA executives appeared on a videoconference screen in STATS headquarters for one more negotiating session, and Kopp could tell without any form of technology that he was in trouble. The suits at the league suddenly looked as if someone had reminded them they were about to pay huge sums of money for something that might not actually work. The deal was dead. Kopp’s boss was furious. “You guys need to think about this and get back to us!” the CEO of the company bellowed.
Click.
STATS hung up on the NBA.
“They’re going to call back,” Kopp’s boss predicted.
“They’re not going to call back!” Kopp replied.
They did not call back.
A basketball junkie who’d played in high school and college, Kopp wasn’t ready to give up on his NBA dream. If the league office was skeptical, he’d try working directly with teams instead. And if there was anyone who would get a special kick from making a deal with a start-up that hadn’t been formally approved by the league office, it was Mark Cuban, a rebel who made a killing in the dot-com boom and turned his fortune into ownership of the Dallas Mavericks.
Cuban was hell-bent on winning an NBA championship and eagerly threw cash at every inefficiency he could find. Unlike freewheeling baseball teams, basketball teams were limited by a salary cap. Since their payrolls were more or less the same, the advantages were on the margins, and Cuban flooded those margins with money. He invested in the biggest airplane and the nicest locker room to entice the most talented players to sign with his team. He also invested in the latest data-guzzling technology. He even hired grunts to code each game’s location data for the Mavericks. He wasn’t the only one to realize that just because something had always been done one way didn’t mean there wasn’t another, better way. The Houston Rockets were outsourcing the same kind of work to be done by hand in India. But they couldn’t do it for every team and every game. SportVU could.
The Dallas Mavericks became the first major American sports team to pay for SportVU when they had their arena equipped with six high-resolution tracking cameras. They spent the bulk of the 2011 season trying to capture and quantify everything that happened on the court. “We used so many different sources of data,” Cuban says. They built their own internal analytics and bought others like SportVU. If there was any kind of data that had even a remote chance of helping them win one more game, the Mavericks were interested, and some of those metrics inspired them to save their most unconventional strategies for their most important games. In the NBA Finals that season, they decided their best chance of stopping LeBron James was a guard named J. J. Barea, who was generously listed at six feet and might have been that tall in lifts. One of the shortest players in the entire league made an enormous difference for the Mavericks. The season that began with the installation of Kopp’s cameras ended with the NBA championship.
SportVU was here to stay. The first six teams to buy SportVU were the Mavericks, Rockets, Boston Celtics, Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs, and none other than the Golden State Warriors. The only remaining question was how much they could afford to spend. If you divided the amount each team spent on payroll by its number of wins, the price of a single win in the NBA was about $2 million. Since it was obvious that SportVU would help NBA teams win at least one game, that should have put its value somewhere north of $2 million per year. But the budgets of NBA teams didn’t match their brains. This wasn’t the same as spending on a player. It was more like an office expense. SportVU was the toner cartridge in the printer. The smart NBA teams saw the $30,000 price tag as a truly extraordinary bargain. Here was a tool that barely cost anything but could turn a basketball game into a collection of data rich enough to alter the behavior of millionaires competing in a zero-sum marketplace.
But immediately after the Mavericks won the championship, there was an NBA lockout. The business of basketball stopped for six months. At first this was a welcome development for Brian Kopp. NBA teams suddenly had nothing better to do than listen to him. When he visited the New York Knicks, he figured they would bring a few people to a meeting that would last a few minutes. They brought their entire staff to a meeting that lasted three hours. “The lockout was one of the best things that could have happened to us,” he says. “It opened the eyes of people who might have been resistant to the use of data. It almost made them have to pay attention.”
The problem for Kopp was that his bosses were paying attention, too. They had gambled $18 million on an Israeli start-up, but all they had to show for their investment three years later were some measly $30,000 checks and one season of data.
It was a maddening time for Kopp. He felt that he and the rest of the STATS crew hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface of possibilities with SportVU. They were only asking questions. They were still waiting for answers. His dream was to hire a team of mythical geeks who could delve into the SportVU data and report back on what they encountered. But he was also a pragmatist. He could read a balance sheet. And he didn’t have to go to business school to understand that his budget wouldn’t allow him to poach the analysts of his fantasies. Kopp was stumped. Ever since his first trip to Tel Aviv, he’d sensed that he was on to something and it was something big, something that could influence the way sports were played forever. It no longer sounded preposterous when he said that aloud. The whole point of Kopp’s job was to reduce uncertainty. Now he was surrounded by it.
What he didn’t realize was that the mythical geeks of his imagination already existed and he wouldn’t have to pay them a dollar. They had dependable jobs, fancy titles, and reliable sources of income. The idea of making any money from SportVU never even crossed their minds. The data he was offering was so rich they might have paid him. And they weren’t “mythical geeks.” They were professors.
These researchers with sterling credentials were the saviors of SportVU. They could see the potential of this technology without having to sit through a formal presentation. These were smart people with sharp questions, and they were so exuberant to apply the scientific process to basketball that many of them already had their hypotheses ready for testing.
There were certain things they had always believed to be true. But they could never know for sure. They didn’t have the right data.
The war had been over for more than a year when Maj von Dardel wrote the letter that she hoped would end her personal hell.
“Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” she began.20
Her wrenching, typewritten note to Eleanor Roosevelt began with a formal introduction and a plea. “Knowing your warmheartedness and kindness to all those who suffer, I have gathered courage to write to you,” she wrote. “I am the Mother of the Swedish Secretary of Legation Raoul Wallenberg of whom you may have heard.”
She continued: “As a mother, I am no unchallengeable witness but I know that his coworkers and the people he saved could all tell you about his remarkable courage and ability, which enabled him to risk his life day after day in this gamble with armed criminals with the lives of thousands of innocent people at stake. . . . The fact that a great part of the Hungarian Jews have survived can be attributed essentially to one man working as the representative of the Swedish king and the American president—my son.”
Maj von Dardel had reached out to the former First Lady of the United States because her son who had saved so many lives needed someone to save his. Raoul Wallenberg hadn’t been a free man since he walked inside the secret police headquarters on Lubyanka Square. The exact reason for his arrest and imprisonment remains unclear to this day, and everyone following his ordeal would be haunted by a question that has never been answered to anyone’s satisfaction: What happened to Raoul Wallenberg?
Many years after his mother wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, she wrote another heartbreaking letter to the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, the man who helped capture Eichmann himself. “Not knowing is the worst,” she said. “To know that my son may be alive, that he may be suffering, has been admitted to a mental institution, is starving in a prison or forced to perform hard labor is much worse than if I could know with certainty that he were dead.”21
But the tale of Wallenberg’s vanishing had devolved into a maze of lies, contradictions, and deception. By then the Soviet Union had offered several conflicting accounts of his fate. The obfuscation was enough to make anyone’s head spin. First officials said that Wallenberg was in Russia and safely under Soviet protection. Then they said that he’d been murdered. Then they said that he was not in the Soviet Union and never had been and that no one even knew who he was. Then they said he’d died of a heart attack. And then, finally, they said he’d been executed.
The stories of Wallenberg’s heroism were beginning to spread around Sweden, however, and his twist of fate brought yet more nobility to his family’s name. But the name still meant nothing to most people in the United States when Marvin Makinen heard it for the first time. He would become familiar with the Wallenberg case under circumstances that he would never forget.
Makinen was on the path to medical school when he decided in 1960 to spend a year abroad in Berlin.22 It turned out to be more than a year when he was approached in May 1961 by two U.S. intelligence officers who asked him to be a spy. He agreed to their request. Makinen rented a green Volkswagen Beetle and drove toward the Soviet Union as a tourist. He was as much of a tourist as Wallenberg had been a diplomat. Makinen’s mission was to snap covert photographs of military facilities on his way to and in the Soviet Union. He was taking pictures of barracks in the outskirts of Kiev when he was arrested by KGB agents on suspicion of espionage. Makinen was held in solitary confinement for three months, and he was found guilty by a military tribunal and sentenced to two years in prison and six years in a labor camp. Makinen was supposed to be going to medical school. Now he was going to a Soviet prison.
He spent the next twenty months in a prison several hours outside Moscow in a city called Vladimir. It was the place where the most notorious political inmates were incarcerated, and the conditions inside Vladimir Central Prison were as bleak as you might imagine. His saving grace was that he didn’t have to serve his full sentence. Makinen was freed as part of a spy trade—two Americans for two Russians. The other American was a white-haired priest. At one point he’d been declared legally dead by the Vatican. But when they walked off the plane, he looked more alive than Makinen. Makinen had weighed 155 pounds before prison. By the time he stepped on a scale in the United States, he had already been home for a week, and he could tell that he’d added several pounds to his emaciated frame. When he finally looked down, he couldn’t believe the number staring back at him. He weighed 105 pounds.
It goes without saying that Vladimir was not the easiest place to make lasting friendships. Even the most basic communications required the prisoners to be resourceful. They developed an elaborate tapping system, passed notes to each other, and traded gossip when they were transferred from cell to cell. But those brief conversations were valuable sources of intelligence. They were how Makinen came to possess one of the few things that he took with him back to the United States. It was the rumor that somewhere inside the Vladimir Central Prison was a prisoner from Sweden.
“I always thought that was odd,” he says.
Sweden had remained a neutral country. The idea of one of its citizens being in a Soviet prison was odd. While he was debriefed in the State Department, Makinen mentioned this rumor about a Swedish prisoner, someone named Vandenberg. Then he was invited to the Swedish embassy a year later. Makinen was puzzled. He’d already been interviewed by the Swedes. Why did they need to speak with him again? His confusion gnawed at him until he was saying his goodbyes after that second interview and stumbled upon a clue. He told one of the Swedish diplomats that he was going on a date that night with a Swedish exchange student. It was true, but that’s not why he said it. He said it to provoke a reaction. He got what he was looking for. “We ask you not to talk to anyone about this,” the Swedish diplomat said. That response stuck with Marvin Makinen.
Who was this person? he thought.
They wouldn’t tell him that much. But when he asked what this person did, they told Makinen that he’d been arrested in Budapest “helping Jewish people to escape from the Nazis,” he recalls.
It would be another sixteen years before he found out more.
By then he was a professor in the University of Chicago’s department of biochemistry and molecular biology. He’d survived one of the most stressful experiences any living man had endured and now he was a respected professor. Makinen came home late one night in 1980 after a long day at his lab conducting spectroscopic studies requiring liquid helium. It was about three a.m., but he was still wired from work, and he poured himself a glass of orange juice and took the New York Times Magazine to his living room. As he flipped through the pages, he came across one story that captured his attention.23 It was called “The Lost Hero of the Holocaust.” He nearly choked on his orange juice once he started reading.
For almost two decades, he’d believed there was a Swedish prisoner in the Soviet gulag, someone named Vandenberg. Now it all made sense. Makinen realized why the Swedish embassy was so interested in his testimony. It was because he was half right. There was a Swedish prisoner. But his name wasn’t Vandenberg. The Swedish prisoner was named Wallenberg.
Makinen repeated the names to himself like a mantra. Vandenberg. Wallenberg. Vandenberg. Wallenberg. It must have been lost in translation—Wallenberg had been pronounced Vallenberg so many times through the prison grapevine that it had slowly morphed into Vandenberg.
Makinen contacted one of the people mentioned in the article the very next morning. He called the front desk of the Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University and asked for a high-energy physicist named Guy von Dardel, the son of Maj von Dardel and half brother of Raoul Wallenberg. He was transferred. He introduced himself. They hung up three hours later. From that day on Makinen would be part of the team searching for Wallenberg. He wouldn’t stop looking for the rest of his life.
Makinen’s realization coincided with a broader public acknowledgment of Wallenberg’s bravery. By the late 1970s, Wallenberg’s relatives had become demoralized. They had been investigating his disappearance for decades but were no closer to finding him, and Maj von Dardel’s granddaughter once asked why she was still toiling away. “One can’t accept the fact that a person just disappears,” Wallenberg’s mother said.24
But one was becoming many. As the pressure on the Soviet government intensified, Wallenberg’s living relatives were invited to Moscow by the KGB in 1989 to retrieve his possessions from the time of his arrest: his Lubyanka registration card, diplomatic passport, calendar, address book, cigarette case, and the money that he was carrying almost forty-five years earlier. An international committee organized by Guy von Dardel was later provided with documents of the Soviet prison system, the first time any group not affiliated with the government had been given such information. They were disappointed that Wallenberg was nowhere to be found in the prison records they inspected. But they weren’t discouraged. They could sense the Russians offering a guise of cooperation during this period of glasnost. “To hinder the investigation25 of the case of Raoul Wallenberg is to stand on the wrong side of history,” one Soviet minister told them.
The official party line was that Wallenberg, who exercised daily and had no family history of cardiac problems, had dropped dead of a heart attack when he was thirty-four years old. But now Makinen and his team of Wallenberg hunters finally had more than a false sense of hope of figuring out what the real story was. They also had a plan. They had been given permission to photograph the registration cards of roughly 900 prisoners: names, dates and places of birth, professions, nationalities, citizenships, criminal offenses, and the cells they occupied in the various buildings comprising the Vladimir Central Prison. These registration cards were the key to understanding how the prison worked. It made for the best data that had been collected in nearly a half century of searching for Wallenberg.
But they needed more data. They needed bigger data. They needed better data.
Makinen now believed that if their data was good enough, they could build a database of the Vladimir building where Wallenberg was reportedly imprisoned. Makinen argued to the Russians that he should be allowed to copy the registration cards of every prisoner who had spent as little as one day in this wing between the years of 1947 and 1972. This information might help them solve the mystery. “I knew in principle what could be done,” he says. “I didn’t really know how to do it.”
He did not divulge to the Russians that he couldn’t write the necessary software. He bluffed. He’d claimed that he could complete the analysis, and now he had to find someone who could. Someone who knew his way around computers. Someone who was fluent in the latest technology, versed in the scientific process, and comfortable with massive amounts of data. Someone like Ari Kaplan.
Ari Kaplan grew up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, one of the American centers of the Jewish diaspora, where survivors of the Holocaust settled because of its proximity to New York City, to plentiful jobs, and to one another. Kaplan went to the California Institute of Technology, worked for Silicon Valley companies in the early internet era, and consulted for the Department of Defense as an intelligence contractor during the Gulf War. But his real specialty was sports. When he was a freshman at Caltech, Kaplan tried out for the baseball team. This being the Caltech baseball team, he soon found himself in the dugout wearing a uniform, an honest-to-goodness college athlete. He went to the plate four times. He struck out four times.26
But what he lacked in baseball talent he made up for in baseball smarts. After his freshman year, before his tryout and long before any of his strikeouts, he did something that was more typical of a Caltech student: he applied for a research grant. The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Award was meant for the hard sciences, the type of stuff that appealed to Caltech undergrads, the people who would have rather passed their summers crunching numbers than riding waves. Kaplan spent his grant money studying Major League Baseball. The math that he was learning at Caltech dovetailed with the increasingly analytical thinking that was beginning to seep its way into professional sports, and he pored over box scores in the microfilm room of the nearest library to piece together a comprehensive history of relief pitching in baseball. The statistics that he unearthed were an effective way of thinking about a common problem—the problem in this case being the question of how to appropriately value the job of a relief pitcher in baseball.
This was heady research for the early 1990s. It would be more than a decade before a man named Bill James, the godfather of baseball sabermetrics, the process of applying statistical rigor to sports, was hired as a consultant to the Boston Red Sox and helped them win their first World Series in eighty-six years. Back then he was27 the kind of guy who wrote fan letters to professors like Amos Tversky. James was still at the point of his career when he was ostracized by people inside baseball, who felt threatened by the unknown, and lionized by people outside baseball, who were excited by the unknown. Kaplan fell in the latter category, and James was aware that he was becoming one of Kaplan’s inspirations. “Our ability to generate stats has gotten way ahead of our ability to make any sense of it,” he said at the time. “The first generation of computers gave us lots of numbers, but it’s going to take . . . a lot of work by people like Mr. Kaplan before we understand what all this means.”28
But there was one power broker in baseball who liked Bill James, in part because this person was more familiar with the world of young Ari Kaplan. Eli Jacobs was a member of Caltech’s board of trustees. When he attended the presentation of SURF Award winners, Jacobs paid closer attention than any of the other rich Caltech alumni in the room. He thought this kid who had studied the history of relief pitching in Major League Baseball could help with one of his recent investments. The man had just become the owner of the Baltimore Orioles. He hired Kaplan on the spot.
Kaplan’s time with the Orioles taught him that it paid to hoard information. He worked with professional athletes who made more money than he did and grizzled executives who had more experience than he did. Information was his only form of currency. He took the filing cabinets where the Orioles stored their scouting reports and turned them into something with a fancier name than filing cabinet: a database. His computerization of information had a curious effect on the organization. The scouts who wrote their reports on computers began to get read. The scouts who scribbled in pencil began to get envious. They didn’t take kindly to change, and they were suspicious if not outright contemptuous of the kid responsible for that change. They were all for certain kinds of information, but not his kind of information. Kaplan got used to being ignored.
But then Kaplan was introduced to someone who valued his input. His mother heard through a friend who had been Wallenberg’s secretary in Budapest that Marvin Makinen was searching for a computer whiz. “My son would be perfect for this!” she said.
Kaplan was already familiar with Wallenberg’s story when he visited Makinen’s office, and the molecular biology professor briefed the twenty-five-year-old baseball dork on the status of his search for a missing war hero. Kaplan was eager to help, and Makinen needed all the help he could get. He’d recently had a breakthrough in his search for Wallenberg.
A warden in Vladimir had told him about an elderly woman who had worked in the prison since 1946, and she’d agreed to be interviewed in the place where she had spent every weekday since she was a teenager. Her name was Varvara Larina. She was cautious around Makinen at first. The staff hadn’t been permitted to speak with outsiders about their jobs during the Soviet era. “We were not allowed to talk about the prison, and I will not do so now,” a former guard had told Makinen on that same trip. But this interview was taking place in the office of the prison’s chief physician. When she was hesitant, he said: “Tell what you know.” Larina wasn’t used to speaking about prisoners, especially with people she didn’t know, and even more especially with explicit permission from her old bosses. But she relaxed once she was assured that she could say anything she wanted. It turned out that Varvara Larina had something remarkable to say.
Their interview in December 1993 began with a discussion of her myriad jobs: cleaning prison cells, serving meager amounts of barely edible food, sterilizing equipment in the hospital wing. Larina didn’t remember many of the people who had passed through the prison. That wasn’t really her job. In fact it was specifically not her job. But when she was asked if she could recall any foreign prisoners, she admitted that she remembered one man. He was a prisoner kept in solitary confinement on the prison’s third floor, and she recalled many things about him for someone who wasn’t supposed to recall anything. He was a Westerner but not German. His arms were skinny. His fingers were long. His dark hair was thinning. And there was one more thing about him. He was in a cell opposite to one occupied by a man named Kirill Osmak.
Makinen asked why she remembered this prisoner out of all the prisoners.
“He complained constantly about everything,” Larina said.29
He was especially persnickety about soup. His soup was always cold because he was at the end of the food service. Even when it was hot, it was still prison soup. It was so thin he could see fish bones in the broth. (“And sometimes an eye,” Makinen recalls from his own stint in Vladimir.) While this man complained constantly about everything, he really couldn’t stand the cold soup. The prison’s head guard finally snapped and ordered Larine to serve this prisoner first. She changed her entire route to accommodate one person. She had to ladle his soup first even if it meant climbing three flights of stairs with a heavy kettle before returning to feed the quieter prisoners on the first floor.
There were very few ways in which Ari Kaplan could relate to Varvara Larina. But when he was a kid, there was a woman on his paper route who woke at the crack of dawn, and she insisted that she get her Times of Trenton before anyone in the neighborhood. This was a colossal pain in Ari Kaplan’s teenage butt. She lived at the end of the route, and Kaplan had to drag himself out of bed earlier than any boy would have liked. But he eventually yielded to her persistence. And he learned a lesson along the way. “You would remember somebody who complained day in and day out for months,” he says. The frequency of her complaints left such an impression on Kaplan that he would never forget Ms. Kravitz from 18 Empress Lane, much like Varvara Larina would always remember this prisoner who forced her to change a daily routine.
It struck Makinen as unlikely that Vladimir’s guards would ever grant any prisoner’s wishes. He knew from his experience that ordinary prisoners would have been ignored if they complained about the temperature of soup. “Shut up! You’re in prison” was a typical retort from the guards. A prisoner who complained as much as this man would have been sent to a punishment cell—bread and water every other day, and no sleeping blanket at night.
It was extraordinary for a prisoner to get his way. There must have been a reason that he was allowed to be different. Makinen took it upon himself to find out. He showed Larina a photographic lineup of fifteen men who looked nothing alike to see if any of them resembled the prisoner who hated cold soup.
“That’s him!” she said.
She was pointing to a picture of Raoul Wallenberg.
It was a portrait from a side angle that only someone familiar with his appearance would have associated with him. That side angle was how Larina interacted with Wallenberg when he sat on his bed and she arrived with his soup of varying temperatures. It was a flabbergasting admission. But you wouldn’t have known it by Makinen’s reaction. He kept his cool and continued with the interview. It was even more important for him to maintain a poker face because an eyewitness like Larina had dropped a bombshell. The last thing he needed was for such valuable information to be tainted. Makinen didn’t want Larina to believe she would be rewarded for saying anything that impressed him.
When he went back to Larina one year later to make sure she remembered Wallenberg the same way, he used the methods the Swedish diplomats had used on him after his return to the United States, a common trick in forensic investigations to assess how much a witness really knows. She told the same tale and picked the same photograph. That only made him want to come back again. Once again she told the same story. That she never embellished or changed any details made her testimony more credible in the eyes of Makinen. He even showed her digital re-creations from a forensic artist that depicted what Wallenberg might have looked like at different times of his life. She nodded at the one of Wallenberg in his midforties—the approximate age he would’ve been when his neighbor Osmak died.
What made this turn of events truly astonishing was that Osmak had died in May 1960. The Soviets were still claiming that Wallenberg died in 1947. There was no way around it. Someone was lying. Makinen was pretty sure it wasn’t Larina.
Larina never knew the prisoner who demanded hot soup might have been named Raoul Wallenberg. She didn’t even know who Raoul Wallenberg was. She couldn’t have associated him with the righteous gentile who’d saved all those lives in the Holocaust. She had no reason not to tell the truth. If anything her incentive was to say the exact opposite of what she was saying.
The other piece of tantalizing evidence that startled Makinen came from a less reliable witness: a prisoner named Josif Terelya. Makinen interviewed him three times, once with a Ukrainian translator to make sure they fully understood each other, and it was important to fully understand Terelya, given his history of saying things only partially connected to reality. What he said was that one night in 1970 the Vladimir guard opened the door to his cell for Terelya and his cellmate to use the toilet at the end of the hall. The prisoners were supposed to visit the primitive toilet one cell at a time, but the guards were not always known for their attention to detail, especially not Terelya’s favorite guard. His nickname was the Fool. “We called him that because he was flatulent and often passed gas loudly and with comical histrionics,” he recalled.30 The Fool was on duty that night and opened Terelya’s cell door seconds earlier than he should have.
That brief moment of indiscretion was all it took for Terelya to notice an elderly prisoner on his way back to cell 25. He’d never seen this prisoner before. Terelya could tell that he was a foreigner. He tried to keep track of his whereabouts from that point on, and he made a mental note to himself when the mysterious prisoner in cell 25 moved a week later to cell 33. The next time the Fool came around, Terelya asked him for a favor, the type of favor that only a prison guard named the Fool would have granted: he asked for the leftover cupboard in cell 25. The Fool obliged. Terelya searched the cupboard for clues of this prisoner’s identity and found one written in purple ink. On the back of the cupboard were three words: “Raoul Wallenberg Sweden.”
The only way for Marvin Makinen to verify this story was to study the data with Ari Kaplan. And to crack the mystery of Raoul Wallenberg they would have to go to prison. That’s where the better data was.
In the case of Makinen, that meant going back to the same prison where he’d spent the worst years of his life. He’d felt tense with trauma the first time he returned to Russian soil in 1990. “After that I suppressed it,” he says. “I had decided that I’m going to get this done. If I let myself be stressed by it, I wouldn’t have gotten anything done.” While it wasn’t as stressful for Kaplan, he’d become intensely devoted to the search, too. “I was determined like nothing else to find out what happened to him,” Kaplan says. “That’s all I was focused on.”
Every morning the two Americans had breakfast together in their hotel to discuss their goals for their grueling workdays. It was imperative that they had a plan for their allotted time in Moscow because there was only so much they could accomplish before they went back to their real jobs in the United States. It wasn’t like they could take anything home with them. Their documents, their spreadsheets, their laptops—they were all stored in Moscow and couldn’t be transported beyond Russian territory. Kaplan was in one room developing software and testing it. Makinen was in the other room examining the scanned registration cards against their computer representations. Everywhere they went, there were two guards. “One watching my left hand, and one watching my right hand,” Kaplan says.
The Wallenberg detectives had negotiated access to a trove of data before they arrived. They spent a week in March 1998 scanning the brittle paper copies of registration cards for every Vladimir prisoner who had spent at least one day in the building where Wallenberg had been seen between 1947 and 1972—the period between his alleged death and when his possible sentence would have ended. That left them with 8,049 prisoners. Next they wanted to know which cells those 8,049 prisoners occupied. The registration cards had every prisoner’s cell history—including when and where they were moved. This was crucial information. By the time Kaplan and Makinen and their team had transcribed the cards and transferred all that crucial information onto Hewlett-Packard laptops, they had a database of 98,030 cell records. They had created SportVU for Vladimir.
In their hands was a comprehensive history of a Soviet prison over twenty-five years. Marvin Makinen now had a proper understanding of who was in which cell on what day because Ari Kaplan had once again turned the contents of a filing cabinet into a computerized database.
But they didn’t trust the data yet. The next step of their investigation was to check their work to make absolutely sure they hadn’t come all the way to Russia only to make some truly unfortunate mistakes. They hired experts fluent in handwritten Russian who scrutinized the handwriting on the registration cards, and if they couldn’t agree on a single character, they brought in one more expert to make a final call. Makinen and Kaplan took enormous pains to avoid human error. They considered their own biases and applied them to the minds of Vladimir’s prison guards. If the records showed a prisoner moving cells on January 1, 1950, for example, they went out of their way to make sure a guard wasn’t feeling the lingering effects of too much vodka from the night before. Did this prisoner really move on January 1, 1950? Or did it make more sense that he moved on January 1, 1951? Only by cross-referencing with other data could they resolve their questions. Such were the quality control measures Kaplan and Makinen implemented as they scrubbed the data.
“It was most important to us to be as objective as possible,” Kaplan says. “We didn’t want to skew the data. We wanted to be true to the data.”
“So we just kept checking,” Makinen says. “When you work in science, you carry out an experiment and get a result. It may be something that you expected. It may also be something that you didn’t expect. But you still have to go back and check your technique. That’s the way that Ari and I worked.”
“The way you crack this,” Kaplan says, this being a transcontinental conspiracy of monumental proportions, “is the unbiased scientific method.”
They couldn’t ask a dead Soviet prisoner if his cell history looked accurate. But they didn’t have to. They asked Makinen instead. He remembered everything about his time in Vladimir. How could he forget? He didn’t need to study the data to understand how frequently prisoners moved around (Makinen being Makinen, he studied it anyway) because he lived through it himself. He could relate to the prisoners whose names were now in a spreadsheet on Kaplan’s computer. He could sympathize with their complaints. He could tell you the location of the medical clinic. He could remember the taste of the terrible soup. And he could explain why someone like Wallenberg complained. It had nothing to do with soup. It was about survival.
“He made sure that he stood out—that everyone was aware of him,” Makinen says. “He was not allowing himself to be forgotten.”
In that way he succeeded. Makinen and Kaplan devoted huge chunks of their lives to not allowing him to be forgotten. But not until they’d flown to Moscow several times a year for weeks at a time and spent thousands of hours on this wild-goose chase in which they didn’t know if the wild goose actually existed did they begin looking for signals in the noise of their data. It was time to find out what happened to Raoul Wallenberg.
Among the eighty-two algorithms they wrote was one that would determine which prisoner was in the cell to which Larina served the hot soup. They had a feeling the answer would be fascinating. It was.
What they found was something they had always believed to be true. But until they’d done all that work, they could never know for sure. They didn’t have the right data.
On the night the NBA lockout ended, Brian Kopp’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Now that teams were finally allowed to make deals again, buying SportVU had become one of their top priorities. By the time he went to sleep, Kopp had deals with ten of the league’s thirty teams to install tracking cameras in their arenas, and he could split the NBA into two groups. On one side were the teams with SportVU. On the other side were the teams without SportVU. On one side were the smart teams. On the other side were the stupid teams.
The divide became so glaring that teams on the stupid half started going out of their way to look smart. In the winter of 2013, the Los Angeles Lakers were the only team without an emissary at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the annual excuse for NBA teams to brag about how smart they were, and they were instantly pegged as the stupidest of the stupid teams. It was a wonderful little twist. Now the nerds were bullying the kids who were too cool for school.
The Lakers decided they could no longer afford to look stupid after their public shaming, and they sought out Kopp to learn more about his SportVU cameras. Kopp noticed the general manager of the Lakers had a thick stack of papers on his desk. He couldn’t help but peek at what he was reading: academic research. Holy shit! Kopp thought. He wasn’t amazed that the top basketball decision-maker of the league’s most glamorous franchise was reading academic research. What astonished him was the bizarre theatrical element of it all. Here was someone performing the reading of academic research. It was as if this NBA general manager had to be seen doing the work or else the whole exercise would’ve been worthless. This same general manager might have sprinted to the nearest paper shredder if he’d known the research on his desk was being produced by college kids between their classes.
When the Lakers were busy winning NBA championships, Carolyn Stein had been a student at a high school outside Boston. The only way into the honors science classes at her school was to participate in the annual science fair. It may have been the most highly competitive science fair on the planet. Stein’s classmates were the children of biologists, chemists, and physicists accustomed to spending long hours in their parents’ laboratories at Harvard and MIT. They were not making chemical volcanoes. “They were, like, sequencing genes,” she says.
There were very few people at her school with such a sharp appreciation of their good fortune to come from a long line of scholars. Her grandfather was a Princeton mathematician who fled Europe in the 1940s and spent his first three weeks in the United States falling in love with the “strange game with sticks”31 better known as baseball, and her father was a Harvard economics professor who served on the U.S. Federal Reserve System while she was in college. But for this particular science fair, she had no special privileges. Her family couldn’t help her sequence genes. Only after scrutinizing the rules of the science fair did Stein’s father uncover a loophole buried deep in the fine print. The science fair technically allowed for projects in social sciences. “You’re going to do a data project,” he told her.
As the captain of her high school’s basketball team, Stein decided to pour her energy into a data project about the NBA. “It wasn’t that I loved sports,” she says. “It was just that sports data was easy to get.” She wrangled the numbers in her Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and regressed statistics like rebounds and blocks against a player’s weight, race, and position. She called her project “White Men Can’t Jump.” “I almost got disqualified,” Stein says. It was not like her to concoct a science-fair exhibit that managed to be controversial. “I was such a goody two-shoes kid,” she says. “But I was just letting the numbers do the talking.”
It was not exactly surprising that a high-school student producing intriguing, vaguely scandalous research would make her way to nearby Harvard, and one of the first things that Stein did after moving into her freshman dorm was attend the activities fair. She stumbled across an oddly named club: the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective (HSAC). She was more intrigued by analysis than sports. She went to a meeting, walked back to her dorm room, and told her neighbor John Ezekowitz that it seemed like a club that would appeal to him. Ezekowitz liked sports as much as analysis. A national Scrabble champion, he worked for the assistant Treasury secretary for economic policy when he was a teenager. He wasn’t allowed to watch television at home when he was a child, but there was always one exception to this rule: sports. He watched a lot of sports.
The existence of this club at Harvard about sports analysis could be traced back to Michael Lewis’s book about the Oakland Athletics and their reliance on data to search for inefficiencies in what should have been an efficient market. The influence of Moneyball is simply impossible to overstate. There’s a line of demarcation in the history of professional sports: before Moneyball and after Moneyball. One person mentioned in the book was a Harvard statistics professor named Carl Morris who encouraged the students who came to him for advice to start a club about sports analytics. They didn’t have to ask for a dean’s permission to discuss all the ways in which their favorite sports teams were being transformed by data, but there was one benefit to registering as an officially sanctioned Harvard student organization: money. They spent that money on booze. “The club was founded,” Ezekowitz says, “as an excuse to get free beer.” That eventually changed. The college stopped funding the club, and the club stopped drinking beer.
The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective had been around for only a few years by the time Ezekowitz was elected president. It met in a stately room that appeared specially designed for afternoon tea, with its pastel wallpaper and many portraits of very old, very white men. Ezekowitz sat at the head of a long oak table surrounded by a bunch of bleary-eyed Harvard students. This was a meeting of dorks who liked talking about sports with other dorks. Ezekowitz called the meeting to order with a round of icebreakers. It was time for everyone in the room to introduce himself—or herself, but mostly himself—by naming a favorite sports book. The only catch was that it couldn’t be Moneyball.
“How about the Moneyball screenplay?” someone cracked.32
The youngest members of the club were about five years younger than I was when I visited in 2011. But what I realized when I looked around the oak table was that we belonged to different generations. In those five years, something had changed about the world, something that had never occurred to me before that night. Moneyball had been published. The book had been placed in their hands during their formative years as sports fans, which meant they were guided by a touchstone reassuring them that it was perfectly reasonable to make science of art. It was only natural that they would apply their smarts to sports. They belonged to the Moneyball generation. The idea that beliefs could and should be grounded in statistics didn’t change the way these kids in the stuffy room at Harvard thought about sports. It was the way they thought about sports.
These college students didn’t simply read Moneyball. They inhaled Moneyball. They lived and breathed Moneyball. And soon they embodied Moneyball. There was one passage in this book about finance, smack in the middle of a history of derivatives, that might as well have been their erotica. “The sort of people who quickly grasped the math of the matter were not typical traders,” Lewis wrote. “They were highly trained mathematicians and statisticians and scientists who had abandoned whatever they were doing at Harvard or Stanford or MIT to make a killing on Wall Street. The fantastic sums of money hauled in by the sophisticated traders transformed the culture on Wall Street, and made quantitative analysis, as opposed to gut feel, the respectable way to go about making bets in the market.”33
The kids around the oak table could have been those ambitious traders, seduced by the opportunity to attain fabulous amounts of wealth, if not for the fact that swapping derivatives was no longer the most exciting opportunity available to them. They didn’t have to exploit the inefficiencies of financial markets. They could apply their way of thinking to sports instead. It wouldn’t be as insanely profitable, but it would be a whole lot more fun. These college students had the inclination, they certainly had the time, and, now, for the first time, they had the data. They could study anything that grabbed their attention—even the ideas that had been litigated to death before they were alive. They could unsettle settled science. And they would start with the hot hand.
It’s not like some kids at Harvard were the first people to take issue with certain parts of the original paper about the hot hand. Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky were bombarded with criticism from the second they published the study. That’s partly why they published the study. Tversky and Gilovich even wrote an explainer of their paper in a 1989 issue of Chance, the official journal of the American Statistical Association. “The more basketball one watches,” wrote two people who watched a whole lot of basketball, “the more one encounters what appears to be streak shooting.”34 But in a subsequent issue of Chance, three statisticians wrote a biting response. “It’s Okay to Believe in the ‘Hot Hand’” was the title of their paper. The evidence they presented for the hot hand was so easy to dismiss that Tversky and Gilovich were able to do it in the same issue of the journal. Pages 22 to 30 were one side of the argument. Pages 31 to 34 were the other side.
The response that Tversky and Gilovich swatted aside was only the first in a series of sustained attacks over several decades. The researchers in their wake weren’t content with limiting their inquiry to basketball. They reexamined the cases for and against the hot hand in baseball, bowling, tennis, horseshoes, golf, volleyball, and darts. If enough people believe that some kind of physical activity is a sport, the odds are that it’s been picked apart in search of the hot hand. The most convincing studies did not question what Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky found so much as how they found it. The accusation that stuck was that their samples were not large enough and their statistical tests were not powerful enough to detect the hot hand. Even if there were such a thing as the hot hand, the paper that debunked the phenomenon wouldn’t have detected it.
Which brings us back to John Ezekowitz. By the end of his freshman year in college, he was poring through sports data and publishing ideas on the HSAC’s blog that could help professional sports teams win games, and real people working for actual professional teams were reading him. Ezekowitz didn’t know any of this until one Friday night in August, when he was neck-deep in a database that made his laptop crawl to a halt. His computer was acting like it had run a marathon on a summer day. It was hot, exhausted, and on the verge of passing out. When he published his blog post, it was a Friday night in August. He couldn’t have picked a worse time to get eyeballs on the internet. For the next twenty-four hours almost nobody read it. But then Ezekowitz noticed a comment underneath the blog post. It was from Mark Cuban.35
When he was done rubbing his eyes in disbelief, he decided that he must be doing something right if he was getting a response from an NBA owner. Perhaps this whole sports thing was worth pursuing. Maybe he could be a volunteer number cruncher for Harvard’s basketball team. They couldn’t pay him, and the data wouldn’t be great, and his insights would probably be ignored. But still! It was a collection of athletes whose behavior might, in some way, at some point, be influenced by his brain. That was an intoxicating thought.
Ezekowitz was in his econometrics class one day when he received the phone call that would make all those plans seemed quaint. When his phone rang, he didn’t recognize the area code. He decided to pick up anyway. He politely excused himself from class and stepped outside to answer. One of those real people from an actual professional sports team was on the line. The Phoenix Suns were calling.
The Suns were being pitched on SportVU by Brian Kopp, but they didn’t know what to do with all the information they would soon be getting from the cameras in their arena. They used to have not enough data. Now they had too much data. The Suns had contacted a former president of HSAC who happened to be working for another sports team and begged him for a recommendation of someone who could help them sort through it. He gave them Ezekowitz’s name. The Suns didn’t mind that the statistical consultant in their new analytics group was younger than their players, or that he was an undergraduate still taking Intro to Behavioral Economics, or that he worked remotely from an office thousands of miles away: his dorm room.
For the next few years, Ezekowitz spent his summer breaks around the Suns players, coaches, and executives, and eavesdropping on their discussions was one of the great joys of his summer job. He felt obligated to pipe up one day as they debated the finer points of a subject that he thought he understood: the hot hand.
As someone who majored in economics and basically minored in basketball, Ezekowitz had read the classic Gilovich, Tversky, and Vallone paper. He’d been taught that people believed in the fallacy even after they were told it was a fallacy. Although he now worked with those people, he was still a little stunned about how strident they were. “There were tons of former NBA players and college players in the room,” he says. “They would all tell me to a man: This is real.” These were people he respected. They clearly knew more about basketball than he did. And it didn’t offend Ezekowitz that so many of his colleagues disagreed with his intellectual heroes in such a fundamental way. It riveted him.
“There was this strange narrative of academics versus traditional guys, with the academics saying everything you think you know about the game isn’t true and the traditional guys dismissing that,” he says. “But the claims that academic guys make are fundamentally based on the data they have. As data becomes available, things we thought to be gospel may not be anymore.”
He thought he could settle the debate if only he could find the right data. And then he realized that he already had it. Ezekowitz opened his laptop one afternoon during his winter break and typed out an email to his friend Carolyn Stein. “Hope exams are going/went well,” he wrote.36 Ezekowitz and Stein were still living in the same dorm and taking the same economics classes. And he still owed her: she was the one who’d tipped him off to the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective in the first place. It was time for him to pay back his debt.
“I think previous hot-hand studies have all been flawed,” he wrote. “The cool thing is that with the SportVU data I have, I think we can actually make a fairly definitive statement one way or the other. Do you have any interest in doing this as a class with me?”
In his spare time, when he wasn’t searching for Raoul Wallenberg or the molecules that identify cancer, Marvin Makinen was a heli-skier. He got his satisfaction gliding through powder and making fresh tracks. He didn’t bother following trails that already existed. Instead he ripped down the side of a mountain and blasted his own path. He sought out the places he wasn’t supposed to go. That’s where the good stuff was.
The posters from ski trips of years past in his University of Chicago office were some of the only visible signs that Makinen was not like the other biochemistry and molecular biology professors in the building. You had to look beyond the shelves of dog-eared textbooks with names like Classical Electrodynamics and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometry and Theoretical Foundations of Electron Spin Resonance to notice the dusty box in the corner with photocopies of Soviet prison registration cards. Makinen was almost eighty years old, but he still had a sharp recall of every particular detail of his imprisonment. On the afternoon that I visit him with Ari Kaplan, Makinen reaches for a scrap of paper, a quiz about the essential amino acids. He flips the sheet over to its blank side and draws a map of Vladimir prison.
“Terelya was here,” he says.
Josif Terelya’s account was that the Fool opened cell 21 too early and allowed him to glimpse an older, Western, non-Russian prisoner walking back to cell 25 from the toilet at the end of the hall. This mysterious prisoner, the one who had written “Raoul Wallenberg Sweden” on his cupboard, was transferred to cell 33. Makinen had once been placed in that very cell. He had every reason not to believe Terelya, a mystic and self-proclaimed prophet, until he looked at the comprehensive database that Kaplan had built. Then he couldn’t not believe Terelya. “What he told me was exactly, and I mean precisely, confirmed by the database,” Makinen says.
Kaplan and Makinen had created a prison map for February 1, 1970. Terelya was in cell 21, and cell 25 was empty. But once cell 25 was occupied, cell 33 across the hall was empty. This indicated that the authorities had removed the documents identifying a prisoner. As if that evidence weren’t convincing enough, this cell would be unoccupied for the next 117 days, and no other cell in this secluded wing of the prison went empty for more than five consecutive days. With a few keyboard taps on Makinen and Kaplan’s antiquated laptops, Terelya’s account had suddenly become credible. The data supported what he said. It showed that something fishy really was happening in cell 33. It was a statistical outlier.
The next person with a story worth checking was Varvara Larina’s. She was the reason that Makinen had pressed for Vladimir’s records to begin with. “This woman may have been mistaken,” he says. “But we had to test this.” It took much longer than Kaplan would have liked. The computers in prison drove him crazy, and basic queries that would have taken a few minutes to process on his computers back home in Chicago lasted twelve hours in Russia. He let his code go to work every night before he left and hoped that it would be done by the time they came back in the morning. One day Kaplan discovered his laptops were dead. The prison had lost electricity overnight. It didn’t take much forensic evidence to pinpoint the source of the outage. The electrical lines in the basement of the building had been chewed through. “We believe it was rats,” he says.
But once the power was restored and they were confident the data was solid, Makinen and Kaplan clicked and waited for their slow computers to load a map of Vladimir on May 16, 1960. It was the day that Osmak died. Larina specifically remembered a prisoner who complained about cold soup living in one of two cells opposite his. If she misremembered, it would be obvious. There would be someone else there.
So who was in those cells?
“The cells were completely empty,” Kaplan says.
The two cells across from Osmak when he died had been unoccupied for 243 or 274 days, at least if you believed Vladimir’s records, which Makinen and Kaplan didn’t. But just because they didn’t believe them didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t believable. They went back to their records and checked how frequently cells were unoccupied for that long. In their twenty-five years of prison data, there were thousands of empty cells. But most of them were empty for brief periods of routine maintenance, and prisoners were back in those cells within a few days. The longest a cell was empty was seven days. The odds of a cell being unoccupied for 250 days was less than one trillionth of one percent. This was another statistical outlier.
But why would a cell be empty for 250 days? To answer their next question, Makinen and Kaplan singled out the prisoners whose profiles were similar to Wallenberg’s. They could see that ordinary prisoners were generally transferred every 100 days, and the cells without identifiable occupants for 250 days or longer were extraordinary. One of the prisoners who moved cells every 200 to 300 days was the mayor of a city near the Polish border who had witnessed a terrible massacre the Soviets falsely blamed on the Germans. Because he couldn’t be trusted, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, the first seven of which he spent in solitary confinement. Makinen and Kaplan deduced from this pattern of movement that he was someone the Soviet regime took great lengths to isolate from the other prisoners. There was someone else who would have fit that profile: Raoul Wallenberg. This one anonymous prisoner who was transferred after 243 or 274 days was the closest thing to confirmation that Makinen and Kaplan would ever get. The odds of Larina being wrong about Wallenberg were infinitesimal.
It was a sublime moment. Makinen and Kaplan had turned false data into truth. Wallenberg had been expunged from the official records. They had found him anyway.
I have learned in my time interviewing scholars that it’s silly to ask scientists if they have doubts about something. It doesn’t even matter what that something is. Something can be anything. Of course the scientist has doubts. It’s why scientists exist: to have doubts. The general rule of scientists is that the best ones have the most doubts.
But on this one topic, Makinen is unequivocal. There is no reason not to be. He’d collected the evidence. He’d analyzed the data. He felt comfortable making a conclusion. He might never know what really happened. But given what he did know, did he believe that Raoul Wallenberg was alive in prison for all those years he was supposed to be dead?
“I have no doubt,” Marvin Makinen says.
John Ezekowitz and Carolyn Stein were starting their independent study of the hot hand when a former president of Harvard walked into the basketball team’s lounge one day to deliver an impromptu economics lecture. For the next thirty minutes, the basketball players listened to this professor in gym shorts and a gray White House shirt, a scholar once tapped to be the director of the National Economic Council and the secretary of the Treasury. As the Harvard players wolfed down pizza, Larry Summers reflected on his life in economics. There was a New York Magazine reporter in the room to capture the grand takeaway of Summers’s career: “The key is reading data and recognizing what it tells you.”37
It was at that point in his unlikely seminar that a man whose name had been printed on money asked the Harvard basketball players how many of them believed in the hot hand. They all nodded. That was exactly the answer that Summers was expecting. He paused for dramatic effect before he revealed whether it was right to believe in the hot hand.
“The answer is no,” he said. “People apply patterns to random data.”
But not even the leading economic authority in the free world could have forecast that somewhere across campus a few undergraduate students were in the middle of figuring out whether that was actually true. They were reading the data and trying to recognize what it told them. They were attempting to figure out if the hot hand existed.
Almost everyone who hunted for the hot hand before Ezekowitz and Stein had acknowledged their analysis was flawed in a fundamental way. The studies that had found the hot hand to be a fallacy hadn’t properly accounted for the fact that the chances of making a shot varied. “Each player has38 an ensemble of shots that vary in difficulty,” Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky had written, “and each shot is randomly selected from this ensemble.” But was that really true? It seemed clear that player behavior changed when someone had the hot hand. The hot shooter was willing to take greater risks. His next shots were not necessarily coin flips. They could be dependent on the outcome of the previous shot. Remember what happened when Stephen Curry had the hot hand in Madison Square Garden. For anyone to watch that performance and believe that every shot in basketball was the same was like believing you can dunk simply because you happen to have the same name as Michael Jordan. And yet the original investigations of the hot hand essentially hinged on that faulty logic. They didn’t have a choice. They didn’t have the data.
Only when Ezekowitz and Stein went to college were people able to study a topic like the hot hand with more sophistication. They could finally control for all those variables and accurately quantify the difficulty of a shot. That was the fantastically nerdy beauty of SportVU. If they could do it for one shot, they could do it for any number of shots. In fact they could do it for every shot taken in any NBA season.
They had discussed the intricacies of the hot hand when they took Intro to Behavioral Economics, and they had both come to question whether the canonical paper checked out all these years later. If a player thinks he’s on fire, they agreed, he’s going to push his limits and take harder shots. But the previous research hadn’t taken this shift in behavior into account. The idea of doing something that nobody had been able to do before was alluring to Stein when Ezekowitz sent that email pitching her on the independent study. She wasn’t the only one who wanted to work with him. There had been few people in the league who asked Brian Kopp sharper questions than this guy who was consulting for the Suns from his dorm room, and when Ezekowitz briefed him on his plans for a comprehensive study of the hot hand, Kopp barely hesitated before granting a bunch of Harvard undergraduates access to his database. “It was crazy that more academics didn’t want it,” Ezekowitz says, “because it was the richest data there was.”
For hundreds of hours over the next semester, the students took it upon themselves to decipher that data. But first they had to clean it. While the SportVU data was rich, it was also messy. It did not lend itself to easy analysis. One of the other people who was given access to SportVU’s data happened to be a professor across the quad at Harvard. A formally trained cartographer, Kirk Goldsberry was floored when he opened his first SportVU file on his gigantic computer monitor. “All I could see was an ocean of decimal points, trailing digits, and hundreds of XML tags sporadically interleaved among them,” he wrote. “Right away, it was obvious this was the ‘biggest’ data I had ever seen. I’ll always remember my surprise when it occurred to me that everything on my screen amounted to only a few seconds of player action from one quarter of one game.”39 As wonderful as it was, it was also worrisome to Ezekowitz and Stein. If even a fraction of the data was corrupted, their conclusions would be skewed. Marvin Makinen and Ari Kaplan knew the feeling.
By the time they were done, Ezekowitz, Stein, and their computer science expert, Andrew Bocskocsky, another Harvard undergraduate, had a better sense of the numbers that were changing the NBA than most NBA teams. This was because they had more data than Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky could have imagined in their wildest, nerdiest, wonkiest dreams.
Once they plotted eighty-three thousand shots on a court divided into a grid of two-by-two squares, they could tell you anything you wanted to know about any shot from any NBA game. They could tell you where the shooter was, where the defender was, and where everyone else on the court was. They could tell you when the ball left the shooter’s hand down to the twenty-fifth of a second. They could tell you how difficult the shot was. They could even tell you the probability of the shot falling through the hoop. And that meant they could tell you what they really wanted to say. “How is this possible?” Stein says. “For a long time, it really wasn’t, short of watching hours of NBA footage and trying to guess how hard every shot was. You couldn’t do it.” Now you could.
The authors of the original, groundbreaking study of the hot hand had a small fraction of those shots. The quality of their data wasn’t much better than the quantity. That paper treated layups the same as three-pointers, even if those shots have about as much in common as hippos and hamsters. It evaluated shots by hits and misses only. “Simple Heat” is what Ezekowitz, Stein, and Bocskocsky called that formula. But for a proper test of the hot hand, this “Simple Heat” wasn’t powerful enough. It was a task that required something like “Complex Heat.” That meant they would have to invent Complex Heat.
Since they knew everything about every shot—the identity of the shooter, the shooter’s location, the defender’s location, and the shot’s difficulty—they could put a number on its probability. They called that number the “expected shooting percentage.” Their calculation of expected shooting percentage was a useful conclusion in its own right, and NBA teams would soon begin using this metric that hadn’t existed until they came up with it, which would have been a hugely satisfying outcome of nearly any other independent study that semester.
But for Ezekowitz and Stein, it was a means to an end. It was this number that was necessary for them to compute Complex Heat: the difference between actual shooting percentage and expected shooting percentage. Stephen Curry is obviously hotter when he makes five consecutive three-pointers than when he makes five straight layups, but only according to Complex Heat, not Simple Heat. Ezekowitz and Stein were the first to figure out how much hotter. Even when they had gotten that far, they understood how much further they had to go. “We had to spend time thinking about what questions we wanted to ask,” Ezekowitz says.
This was not a trivial matter. Their answers would only be as good as their questions. They settled on two: Do basketball players change their behavior when someone appears to have a hot hand? And once you control for that change in behavior, does that hot hand appear?
The third question on their minds was one they couldn’t quite articulate: What if everything they had been taught about the hot hand was wrong?
These were the sorts of questions that the forefathers of the Moneyball generation would have been asking. As it turned out, one of them was. Bill James had caught a glimpse of how teams made decisions in his time with the Red Sox, and it only made him more curious about the inner workings of sports. Right around the time Boston won the 2004 World Series, he published an essay titled “Underestimating the Fog” in the Baseball Research Journal. “If this was a real scientific journal and I was a real academic, the title of this article would be ‘The Problem of Distinguishing Between Transient and Persistent Phenomena When Dealing with Variables from a Statistically Unstable Platform,’” he wrote. “But I was hoping somebody might actually read it.”40 His wish came true, but not because of the title. It was because the paper itself was irresistible. “I have come to realize . . . that a wide range of conclusions in sabermetrics may be unfounded,” wrote the godfather of sabermetrics.
His acolytes were not used to reading this sort of thing from James, who proceeded to question many of the fundamental truths of the statistical community that had all but elected him mayor. He wasn’t saying they were untrue. He was saying that he couldn’t be sure they were actually true. That someone of Bill James’s stature would keep an open mind about the myths supposedly debunked by science might seem about as predictable as Betty Friedan proclaiming herself a misogynist. But in another way, it was quintessentially Bill James. The man who challenged the conventional wisdom of sports was now doubling back on himself and challenging the contrarian streak that was becoming the conventional wisdom. And you could almost hear him chortle as he typed the following passage about the most famous myth of them all.
“No one has made a compelling argument either in favor of or against the hot-hand phenomenon,” James wrote. He continued:
The hot-hand opponents are arguing—or seem to me to be arguing—that the absence of proof is proof. The absence of clear proof that hot hands exist is proof that they don’t. I am arguing that it is not. The argument against hot streaks is based on the assumption that this analysis would detect hot streaks if they existed, rather than on the proven fact. Whether hot streaks exist or do not I do not know—but I think the assumption is false.41
James then asked the types of people who pore through academic baseball journals in their spare time to imagine themselves on a battlefield. He wanted his readers to put themselves in the shoes of a watchman tasked with protecting his troops. You peer into the distance on a hazy night, but you don’t see anything. You track down the brightest flashlight that you can point at the horizon. And still nothing. Only fog. You report back to your superior: There is no enemy out there.
But are you sure?
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. While the original hot-hand paper was interpreted as saying the hot hand didn’t exist, what it really said was that evidence of the hot hand was absent. The authors had looked for the hot hand and seen the fog. “Let’s look again,” Bill James implored. “Let’s give the fog a little more credit. Let’s not be too sure that we haven’t been missing something important.”42
Carolyn Stein and John Ezekowitz pointed the bright spotlight of their SportVU data into the foggy night. And suddenly it wasn’t so foggy. They could see the rough contours of the hot hand coming into view.
They already knew the answer to their first question of whether basketball players altered their behavior when someone had the hot hand. The real question was if they could detect those changes in the data when they shined a light into the fog. And they could. They found that players took shots that were several feet farther away from the basket and that defenders crept a few inches closer when they felt the shooters were hot. Players were more likely to shoot when they had a hot hand, and the shots they took were more difficult. The assumption that the shots were randomly selected was a specious one. The shots were not independent. They were dependent on one another. This was the first proof that player behavior really did change when they felt the hot hand.
Once they established that much, Ezekowitz and Stein could turn their attention to the good stuff: Did that change in behavior mask the existence of a hot hand?
This is when their invention of Complex Heat came in handy. The hot hand was not about the number of shots that a player made in a row. Not entirely, anyway. The more reliable temperature reading of hotness was how much a player outperformed expectations. Their hypothesis from the second that Ezekowitz pressed send on his email to Stein pitching a study based on SportVU data was that a hot hand would emerge once they controlled for the difficulty of a shot.
Only at this point in their research, when they had painstakingly calculated that basketball shots were not randomly selected, did they have any confidence in the next part of their research: the shocking conclusion that there was such a thing as a hot hand. It amounted to a 1.2 percent improvement for players who made one of their past four shots and a 2.4 percent improvement when they made two of those shots—a small but nonetheless significant effect.43 That is, if a player made a few shots in a row, he wasn’t less likely or the same amount of likely to make his next shot, at least not once you factored in the probability of making harder shots. He was slightly more likely. He was heating up. Then he was on fire.
While the result itself was modest, the meaning of it was monumental. Ezekowitz and Stein had found the best evidence of the famous hot-hand fallacy being a fallacy. Sometimes the truth was purposefully obfuscated by Soviet authorities. But sometimes the truth was simply obscured by data that wasn’t good enough yet. Sometimes it was foggy.
“At the very least,44 our findings cast doubt on the overwhelming consensus that the hot hand is a fallacy,” Bocskocsky, Ezekowitz, and Stein wrote. “Perhaps the next time a professor addresses the Harvard men’s basketball team, the hot hand will not be so quickly dismissed.”
On the day they presented their findings at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Stein received an email from someone who had plowed through their paper and dashed off a note from his iPad. He didn’t need to introduce himself. “It’s an impressive piece of work,” Larry Summers wrote. “Congrats to you and your coauthors.”45 He even took it upon himself to suggest lines of future research. “The broad issue here is variation in human performance,” he wrote. “I feel smarter some days than others. Is this an illusion?”
The people who were the least impressed by this legitimately impressive research were Stein and Ezekowitz. Like any good scientists, they were skeptical about the findings, even if the findings were their own. They had doubts. Instead of overstating their results, they were purposefully cautious, politely reminding anyone who asked that they would’ve loved more data, better data, and that their results were conservative by design. The hot-hand effect they had uncovered was a small blaze and not the inferno of Mark Turmell’s imagination. They were more comfortable defending their central finding that players really do change the way they play when someone on the court has the hot hand. They behave the way they believe. The undergraduates left it to a seasoned psychologist like Tom Gilovich to say that “this is by far the most interesting data I’ve seen supporting the idea that there is a hot hand” and a wizened economist like Larry Summers to say that “better data and better statistical techniques means we’re going to understand the world much better.” That people like Gilovich and Summers were discussing their work seriously was still bewildering to people like Stein and Ezekowitz.
“I don’t think I’ll ever do anything that other people care about as much as this,” Stein says.
“I hope that’s not true,” Ezekowitz says.
“But it probably is,” she says. “I don’t know that in my academic career I’ll ever have an idea that’s so simple but people care about so much.”
All they had done was exactly what they had been told to do. As it happens, it’s what Marvin Makinen and Ari Kaplan had done, too. Carolyn Stein and John Ezekowitz had read the data and recognized what it told them. Their trick was that they had better data. And what their better data revealed was something it had never said before. It told them they might be right to believe in the hot hand.