Great write-up by Erik Bernhardsson, CTO of Better, here: https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the....
The naive conclusion would be that height has nothing to do with basketball ability. The real answer is that markets are efficient and are already correcting one important feature against other predictors. Steph Curry wouldn't even be in the NBA if had the shooting ability of Gheorghe Mureșan.
I would say that height is an advantage up to a certain point in basketball, but tall people are not especially rare. Within the market of basketball players, you can find tall people who also have other skills, sometimes you find short people (Steph Curry) who have exceptional skills.
The statement might as well be "tourist has bad job performance". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich) And that isn't surprising given how much he has to train everyday to stay on top. He even turned down offers from Google/Facebook just to continue qualifying for the big annual competitions like Google Code Jam and Facebook Hacker Cup.
For a more in-depth account on how the top people train, you can check out this guy's advice on how to get two gold medals in IOI: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/69100 and his training schedule: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/69100?#comment-535272
Or this guy, who won IOI this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_Cc4Yk2xe4&feature=youtu.be...
A better example would be Muggsy Bogues who was a full 12" shorter than Steph Curry and he could dunk.
Hiring is always a crapshoot. Pro sports teams spend a lot more time and money on talent evaluation than tech companies and still get it hilariously wrong all the time.
Read between the lines. If all the players are tall, and all the coaches are tall, and the game has been played for more than a half century with that assumption... who knows how to train/coach a short player?
Just because I see some stronger-worded rebuttals in this thread, I want to point out that just because this is true (it is Berkson's Paradox), that does not mean it cannot be a valuable observation. As the author pointed out, for example, it might mean that this attribute is overweighted in hiring, which is something worth considering.
Some teams draft for current skill, others draft for absolutely maximum possible potential, others draft for some combination of both. Some teams are willing to risk a "bust" if there is the potential of ultra-elite league-best skill. And considering that no player who has reached the MVP level has fallen further than 15th, I'd say as a whole the NBA teams are doing very well.
What proportion of people out there can learn to jump so high, even with extensive training/practice?
Ricky Rubio is famous for playing elite basketball since he was a scrawny 14 year old.
And Ricky Rubio has pretty much the same height as Steph Curry.
Like it efficiently chooses all hockeyplayers with birthdays in January to March? [0]
The real answer is people hire based on their biases and organisational restrictions more than they hire on objective metrics - and we have plenty of evidence for that.
I mentioned Steph Curry because the original commenter did, but in general it's very strange to focus on the MVP. That's a small sample and cherry-picking the results, only talking about the successes and overlooking all of the draft busts. There's only 1 MVP in the league every season, and some players have won it multiple times. It was won 5 times by Michael Jordan, who incidentally was drafted 3rd (behind Sam Bowie). Only 21 players have won NBA MVP during that period.
In any case, that MVP record doesn't hold in other sports. For example, NFL MVP Tom Brady was drafted behind 198 other players in 2000.
> NBA teams are really good at "hiring".
Some long-suffering Minnesota Timberwolves fans might say otherwise.
> An interesting paper [1] claims a negative correlation between sales performance and management performance for sales people promoted into managers. The conclusion is that “firms prioritize current job performance in promotion decisions at the expense of other observable characteristics that better predict managerial performance”. While this paper isn't about hiring, it's the exact same theory here: the x-axis would be something like “expected future management ability” and the y-axis “sales performance”.
That said, a quick search of "training to dunk 5'6"" on Youtube brings up a number of videos.