Sam Hinkie arrived at the Philadelphia 76ers in May 2013 with a specific observation about the NBA draft lottery. The lottery awards better odds to worse teams, a redistribution mechanism designed to keep the league competitive. Hinkie noticed something the design hadn't anticipated: mediocrity was the worst position to be in. Good enough to avoid a transformative pick. Bad enough to waste a decade.

His response was to stop being mediocre.

Over three seasons, the 76ers compiled records of 19-63, 18-64 and 10-72. They traded every veteran for future picks. They drafted players who were injured and might not play for years. They called it The Process. "Trust the Process" became a genuine cultural moment, supporters invited to watch losing as strategy, choosing to believe in the logic anyway.

The league was less comfortable. The commissioner appointed an oversight figure to the franchise. Hinkie resigned in April 2016. The institution whose rules he had correctly exploited could not absorb what he had done to its product. The picks were coming. Joel Embiid was already on the roster.

In 2019, the NBA changed the lottery odds. The worst team's probability of the top pick fell from 25% to 14%. The league had concluded the measure was being gamed, so it redesigned the measure.

Analytics teams across American sport had arrived at a similar conclusion about the mid-range jump shot: it was the least efficient shot in basketball, producing fewer points per possession than layups or three-pointers. The Houston Rockets eliminated it almost entirely. By 2018-19, they were attempting more three-pointers than mid-range shots across a full season. James Harden would go entire games without attempting one.

The analysis was correct. The shot was inefficient.

But when every team stopped taking it, defenders stopped guarding the zone. Players who had kept the skill found space their peers had vacated. DeRozan, Leonard and Booker were operating in territory nobody bothered to contest. The most rational collective response to the data had quietly produced an irrationality of its own.

There is a principle in economics, associated with the British economist Charles Goodhart, that once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Sport has tested this at scale, in public, with visible consequences.

The lottery was designed to measure competitive need. A poor record meant a team required assistance. Once franchises grasped they could engineer a poor record, it stopped tracking need and started tracking willingness to lose deliberately. The mid-range was a different version. Shot efficiency correctly measured what it measured. The problem was that every team eliminating the same shot changed the world the analysis had assumed, one where mid-range shooters kept defenders honest and made the zone dangerous. When that world went, so did some of the logic.

The 76ers were responding rationally to an incentive structure. The Rockets were responding rationally to data. The metrics were not wrong. The problem is that optimising for a correct measure changes the system, which makes the measure less correct.

Every KPI, every target set in a quarterly review, contains this mechanism. Not because the people using them are dishonest, but because they are rational. Given a measure to optimise, rational actors will optimise for it. The thing the measure was tracking will shift beneath them, usually slowly, usually without announcement.

The NBA draft lottery next Sunday will be watched closely by teams that spent this season accumulating losses. Some of them will get what they came for. The lottery was designed to make that less likely. It hasn't.

📚 The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller (Princeton University Press, 2018) The most direct book-length treatment of Goodhart's Law in institutional settings. The sporting examples in this piece are the speed-run version; Muller provides the full case.

📰 "Don't Let Metrics Undermine Your Business" by Michael Harris and Bill Tayler, Harvard Business Review, September–October 2019 Harris and Tayler name the corporate version of this problem "surrogation". Recommended for anyone who wants to take the sporting lesson back into their own organisation.

🎬 Thinking Basketball by Ben Taylor, YouTube Taylor's analytics work is the clearest visual demonstration of the mid-range story this piece describes. Watching the shot charts evolve across NBA seasons shows exactly how a correct metric reshaped behaviour at the league level.

Until next time

Business lessons from the world of sport