Marc Gasol’s story is well known. He was drafted as a second-round draft-and-stash prospect by the Lakers before his rights were traded to Memphis in a move that brought Pau to Los Angeles.
Since then, Gasol has becoem arguably the best center in the NBA, providing huge impact for his team on both ends of the court. But there was a time when he was nothing more than the chubby little brother of one of the most skilled bigs in NBA history.
That is to everyone except Daryl Morey. The Houston Rockets GM may have had a hunch that the Spaniard would be this good in the pre-draft process. While that’s impressive, the reason he didn’t draft the big man is even better.
Following from Michael Lewis in “The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds” (h/t Slate):
For instance, in the 2007 draft there had been a player his model really liked: Marc Gasol. Gasol was twenty-two years old, a seven-foot-one center playing in Europe. The scouts had found a photograph of him shirtless. He was pudgy and baby-faced and had these jiggly pecs. The Rockets staff had given Marc Gasol a nickname: Man Boobs. Man Boobs this and Man Boobs that. “That was my first draft in charge and I wasn’t so brave,” said Morey. He allowed the general ridicule of Marc Gasol’s body to drown out his model’s optimism about Gasol’s basketball future, and so instead of arguing with his staff, he watched the Memphis Grizzlies take Gasol with the 48th pick of the draft. The odds of getting an All-Star with the 48th pick in the draft were well below one in a hundred. The 48th pick of the draft basically never even yielded a useful NBA bench player, but already Marc Gasol was proving to be a giant exception. (Gasol became a two-time All-Star in 2012 and 2015 and, by Houston’s reckoning, the third-best pick made by the entire NBA over the past decade, after Kevin Durant and Blake Griffin.) The label they’d stuck on him clearly had affected how they valued him: names mattered. “I made a new rule right then,” said Morey. “I banned nicknames.”
Man, imagine not drafting a future all-NBA player because some people called him Man Boobs. That’s gotta hurt.
In all fairness to the Rockets and Morey, a lot of teams passed on Marc Gasol for the same reason (probably not the same nickname). To his credit, he’s overcome the early stigma and turned himself into one of the league’s best players.
