In the summer of 2004 at 13 years old, I told my parents that one of my goals in life was to play basketball for UBC. In the fall of 2012, that goal became a reality. I became the first player to ‘walk on’ (make the team via tryouts) to UBC in over a decade.
I was ecstatic. It felt like a culmination of all the hard work from the previous 10 years of my life. Not long after, Canadian basketball website NorthPole Hoops approached me for a feature. They wanted to detail my archetypal ascent as an undersized player from an underfunded school who struggled through adversity to succeed.
I accepted and basically did what almost all players do in interviews: tried not to say anything that made me look like an asshole. I thought it was a pretty boring interview.
The article that followed was a hilarious exaggeration of my basketball capacities. They started off by comparing me to Michael Jordan, finished by soliloquizing on my prospects as a professional basketball player, and in between managed to catalog my defensive tenacity, range out to 25 feet, and indomitable passion and work ethic. You can read the full piece here.
When the article came out, I was so embarrassed by the absurdity of the author’s rhetoric that I fell into a miniature existential crisis. I never been cut from a team like MJ, had no intentions of playing pro, was defensively limited, and capped my range at around 17 feet. I loved basketball, but I put just as much work into other areas of my life: school, business, partying, et cetera. Although I could still ball out with the best of them, it seemed to me there were probably 25 other players in B.C who were just as talented as me, worked just as hard as me, and would’ve killed to be in my spot.
It made me ask a strange question of myself:
If I didn’t make the UBC basketball team just based off skill and hard work, why exactly did I make the team?
I had scaled the summit of Canadian basketball only to realize I had no idea what had actually gotten me there. I began to undergo something like an inquiry into my life’s story, picking up all the extraneous threads that had weaved together my existence on this team.
But first, it is important to understand that this kind of examination is extremely taboo in basketball. If I asked my coach why I made the team, he would say hard work and skill. If I asked my teammates why I made the team, they would say hard work and skill. To be honest, if a little kid were to ask me at the time why I made the team, I would tell that kid that it was hard work and skill.
I started to see that this applied everywhere in the game. After games, our coaches’ analysis of our performance could virtually always be classified into the following broad categories: “we worked harder”, “they worked harder”, “we were just a better team”, or “they were just a better team.” And remember – these are some of the best basketball minds in the country.
In the basketball world, there is an unspoken law. Everything must be attributed to two fundamental forces: effort level and skill level.
These factors make up the economic foundation with which we examine a player’s capacity for success. In the short term, skill level is fixed, and a player can only control their effort. In the long term, players can apply that effort to actually improve their skill level. In the same way factories can produce widgets for cheaper as they grow due to economies of scale, players can create greater success for themselves as they improve their economies of skill.
For example, in the graph above, a player at Skill Level 1 (SL1) might be able to outperform a player at Skill Level 2 (SL2) if he has an effort level at point A and the other player’s effort is at point B. However, in the short term, an SL1 player could not compete with an SL3 player given similar effort levels. But, in the long run, an SL1 player can improve his capacity for success through hard work, essentially making himself an SL3 player. This microeconomic relationship was the cornerstone of NPH’s piece on me: I was an SL1 player who worked hard enough in both the long and short run to eventually make a team full of SL5s.
As I said above, this model is foundational to our culture’s interpretation of success. There is sound reason for this: effort (short run) and skill level (long run) are the only two outputs which players truly have 100% control over. Philosophically, to consider other factors would be to subscribe to an unhealthy level of determinism and erode our faith in the virtuous American Dream.
“Any player can succeed if they work hard enough” – this is what we should teach our kids. If it doesn’t hold true, our basketball culture’s vision of meritocracy stands on shaky ground. But I could see that my story didn’t fit cleanly into this model, and I felt I owed it to myself to assess my success honestly. So I looked at my life, and here is what I came up with:
Upon first reading, this might seem like a cynical interpretation, or at least one not nearly as inspiring as the story NPH told. But I think it illuminates an important lesson: the virtues of skill and hard work are necessary, but not sufficient. If I weren’t also a great student and a pretty cool guy, I wouldn’t have made the team. The narrative also completely discounts the realities of the team dynamic – if UBC weren’t in need of a 4 man, I would’ve been out of luck.
30% of my success was entirely out of my control, and another 20% had nothing to do with what I did on the court.
Media groups like NPH, SLAM, and Hoop Mixtape lionize players with a Kobe-esque obsession with the game. Within this “Economies of skill” Narrative, they highlight a #BallIsLife mentality and imply that these players’ success was inevitable given this societal framework. This has created a culture of individualism and self-aggrandizement within basketball that has undoubtedly hurt the game. In truth, a player succeeding entirely off hard work or skill is just as much of an outlier as Kobe himself. I’ve seen too many guys fail because they don’t check off the other boxes: skilled players who can’t get along with teammates, hard workers trying to make the wrong roster, or guys who have it all but just can’t stay in school. You can’t separate a player’s success from the environment that bred him, nor from the character that defines him.
Being a well-rounded individual is just as important for success within the basketball world as it is outside of it.
If more young players understood this, I think we’d see a higher calibre of player. If more teams understood this, we’d see more programs like Duke and Gonzaga that remain not just great, but admirable. Most importantly, I think if we understand this culturally, we won’t just produce better basketball – basketball will produce better people.