First, congratulations to the New York Knicks for winning the 2026 NBA Finals. Super well deserved.
Now let me get my disclaimers in before the internet witch-hunts me. I’m not really a basketball fan (or at least not the kind allowed to have opinions on social media). I picked up the Celtics after moving to Boston in 2022, I watch the playoffs and basically nothing else. So no, I haven’t earned the right to write this.
But a quote from Jalen Brunson (that I only learnt today after sitting through the award ceremony on NBA live and watching the clips they prepared) compelled me to write this article.
All the things that don’t measure heart
When Jalen Brunson was introduced as a Knick in 2022 — before he’d played a single game in New York — he summed up his whole career in one line:
“They said I was too slow, not athletic enough, too small. All the things that don’t measure heart. And that’s what I have.”
Back then it sounded like the thing every overlooked athlete says. This month he didn’t have to say anything. He just lifted the Finals MVP trophy as the second-lowest pick ever to win it.
I’ve spent my whole career around measurement. Exams, KPIs, evaluation frameworks, theories of change. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard the core problem of my field put more plainly than by this six-foot-two point guard explaining why everyone got him wrong.
All the things that don’t measure heart.
Even here?!
Here’s what gets me. Look at where he said it.
Basketball (or the NBA) is supposed to be the pinnacle of meritocracy. You’re either good or you’re not. Even Bronny gets released to the G-League if he can’t score. If anywhere on earth should be safe from the number games, it has to be the basketball court.
And yet.
This season the NBA changed a rule that gives away the truth. For years, a player would reach the end of a quarter with a clean look at a half-court heave — a free swing at three points — and just… not take it. Why? Because a miss would ding his field-goal percentage. A shot that could only help the team, skipped to protect a decimal point.
So this season the league stopped counting missed end-of-quarter heaves against the player. They go on the team’s tab now. (The made ones still count for you — of course they do.) Richard Jefferson called that “cowardly,” which only proves how fiercely these guys guard the number.
Sit with how strange that is. In the most instinctive, improvised game we have, the league had to literally rewrite what counts — because the best athletes alive were quietly choosing their stat line over the win.
That’s the measurement effect. The moment you start measuring something, you change how people behave around it. It shows up everywhere money or status rides on a number: students cramming for the exam instead of learning, sales teams chasing the quota, police forces managing the clearance rate instead of the crime. The NBA just handed us the unusually honest version — where the people in charge admitted the metric had become the problem, and moved it.
Scouts are confidently wrong all the time
Now rewind even further — before the scoreboard, all the way back to scouting. Because data got there too.
The thing about scouts is that they believe their numbers. They have to. And that belief is how a whole room of professionals can look at two national championships and a Player of the Year award and decide that a prospect is simply too small to matter.
The best example isn’t even Brunson. It’s the other short guard on his list of doubters.
Stephen Curry’s 2009 scouting report called his athleticism “below standard” and predicted “limited success at the next level.” It told teams, flat out, not to trust him to run an offense. Curry has spent the fifteen years since reading that report out loud for fun — on his way to becoming, probably, the greatest shooter who has ever lived.
Easy lesson: data is dumb. But that will also be a wrong lesson.
The scouts didn’t fail because they used numbers. They failed because they measured what’s easy to measure — height, wingspan, vertical leap — and had no box for the things that turned out to decide everything. Curry wasn’t missed because of too little data. He was missed because the scouts trusted their data a little too much.
And you know what? Most of the time, the scouts are right. For every Brunson and Curry they missed, there are a thousand undersized guards they correctly called. That’s why they keep writing the reports! But “right on average” is cold comfort when your whole job — in basketball, and in mine — is to find the exception.
The social sector is a scout
In the social sector, we’re all scouts. Funders, intermediaries, evaluators like me — every one of us trying to spot the programme, the NGO, the founder who’ll turn money into the most good. And to do it at any kind of scale, we build systems. Logframes, indicators, scorecards… You name it.
We measure.
And we walk straight into Brunson’s problem. Deep down we know the things that make a programme work are usually the things that don’t fit the form. The founder who won’t quit. The trust a frontline worker spent ten years building. The dignity in how a service is given, not just whether it was. Heart. We all know heart is the difference. We also know it doesn’t survive a spreadsheet.
In other words, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
3D Dinners — what practitioners are actually afraid of
For a while now, my friend and collaborator Marat Yu and I have run a dinner series — we call it 3D Dinners — where we get social sector practitioners around a table to talk honestly about measurement.
They’re not afraid that better measurement will expose them as a failure.
They’re afraid that measurement — imperfect by its very nature — will miss the one thing that makes their work matter. That the number will catch the attendance and lose the transformation. That everything they’ve poured themselves into will land on the report as a low score. Just another program.
So what do we do about it? The obvious move is to build a better metric — add a “heart” column to the scouting report.
But that wouldn’t work. Every time you redesign a metric to fix one distortion, you just open a new hiding place for the next one. A “heart” box wouldn’t measure heart. It would teach everyone how to perform heart for the evaluator.
The real answer is less tidy, and a lot more honest: stop asking measurement to carry more than it can hold.
Let the number be one voice in the room — and have everyone acknowledge that measurements are imperfect in nature. Let the scout actually talk to the player: how he trains, where he’s from, what he does when the gym empties out. And then trust the human on the other side of the table to weigh what the forms couldn’t. We don’t fix the limits of measurement by measuring harder. We fix them with judgment, with relationships, and with the humility to admit what our instruments miss.
For good measure
I named my firm For Good Measure as half a pun and half a promise. Good measurement isn’t maximum measurement. It’s measurement that knows its own limitations — that can tell you, honestly, where the numbers stop and the judgment has to begin.
Brunson didn’t lift that trophy because the scouts finally found the right metric for him. They never did. He won because the whole thing came down to the one quality no report had a box for.
And I think the rest of us — funders, evaluators, anyone trying to turn good intentions into real outcomes — need to hold onto that. The most important number is often the one we could never fit on the form.
So, congratulations again to the Knicks — Brunson, KAT, Mamdani, Spiderman, and all the other players on the Knicks team. And to everyone out there still hearing “you’re good, but…” —
that “but” is wrong far more often than anyone will admit.
This piece was originally shared on LinkedIn. If it resonates — or if you’d push back — I’d love to continue the conversation there.