Basketball teams more than the sum of their parts

Sunday’s New York Times magazine by the always-engaging Michael Lewis on how so-so players can make a team more effective:

Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.

Solving the mystery is somewhere near the heart of Daryl Morey’s job. In 2005, the Houston Rockets’ owner, Leslie Alexander, decided to hire new management for his losing team and went looking specifically for someone willing to rethink the game. “We now have all this data,” Alexander told me. “And we have computers that can analyze that data. And I wanted to use that data in a progressive way. When I hired Daryl, it was because I wanted somebody that was doing more than just looking at players in the normal way. I mean, I’m not even sure we’re playing the game the right way.”

Lewis has covered this topic before in Moneyball and The Blind Side.  This take on teamwork has a great deal of applicability to the people in teams and organizations.  Indeed, it has a lot to do with why we organize in the first place.